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EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 


EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 


BY 

RANDOLPH  BOURNE 

Author  of  "Youth  and  Life,"  **The 
Gary  Schools" 


NEW  YORK 

THE  CENTURY  CO. 

1917 


'l-v\^ 


Copyright,  1917,  by 
^  The  Century  Co. 


Copyright,  1915,  1916,  1917.  by 
The  Republic  Publishing  Co. 


Published,  April,  1917 


.S  V  \  ^ 


PREFACE 

Thesepapers,  reprinted  with  slight  additions^ 
from  thepages  of  the  ^^ New  Eepublie,''  through  ^ 
the  courtesy  of  the  editors,  do  not  pretend  to 
be   anything  more   than   glimpses   and   para- 
^rases   of  new  tendencies   in  the  American 
school  and  college.    The  public  school  is  the^ 
most  interesting  and  the  most  hopeful  of  our 
American  social  enterprises  during  these  days 
of  sluggishness  for  us  and  dreary  horror  for  the 
rest  of  the  world.    It  is  becoming  one  of  the  few 
rational  and  one  of  the  few  democratic  things 
we  have,  and  science  and  hope  are  laying  a 
foundation  upon  which  a  really  self-conscious 
society  could  build  almost  anything  it  chose. 
The  school  fascinates  me  because  there  is  al-' 
most  no  sociological,  administrative  or  psycho- 1 
logical  truth  that  cannot  be  drawn  out  of  its! 
manifold  life.    It  is  the  laboratory  for  human 
nature,  and  the  only  one  that  is  simple  enough 
to  study  with  any  prospect  of  quick  enlighten-  !> 
ment.    Experiment  in  education  has  come  to   \ 


370029 


L 


vi  PREFACE 

stay,  and  this  means  that  we  have  it  in  our 
hands  to  approach  ever  more  closely  our  ideal 
of  education  as  living.  We  can  make  the  school 
ever  more  and  more  nearly  that  child-commun- 
ity life  towards  which  our  best  endeavor  points. 
The  point-of-view  of  these  papers  will  be  rec- 
ognized as  the  product  of  an  enthusiasm  for  the 
educational  philosophy  of  John  Dewey.  But 
what  is  a  good  philosophy  for  except  to  para- 
phrase? The  discovery  of  truisms  means 
merely  that  my  enthusiasms  are  being  communi- 
cated to  an  unappreciative  reader.  Certainly 
the  most  recent  educational  sensation  indicates 
that  there  are  still  crowds  of  professional  edu- 
cators and  parents  to  whom  such  ideas  are  not 
truisms.  To  see  education,  not  as  a  prepara- 
tion for  life  or  as  a  process  segregated  from 
other  activities,  but  as  identical  with  living, 
takes  more  imagination  than  most  teachers  have 
yet  acquired.  If  the  school  is  a  place  where 
children  live  intensively  and  expressively,  it  will 
be  a  place  where  they  will  learn.  The  ideal 
educational  system  would  continue  with  the 
adult  all  through  his  or  her  active  life,  sharpen- 
ing skill,  interpreting  experience,  providing 
intellectual  tools  with  which  to  express  and 
enjoy.    Just    as    education    and    play    should 


PREFACE  vii 

be  scarcely  separable  for  the  little  child,  so^ 
education  and  work  should  be  scarcely  separ- 
able for  the  adult.  By  closing  off  the  school 
and  boxing  up  learning  we  have  really  smoth- 
ered education.  We  are  only  just  beginning 
to  revive.  We  have  first  to  make  over  the 
school  into  a  real  child-community,  filled  with 
activities  which  stimulate  the  child  and  focus 
his  interest  towards  some  constructive  work, 
and  then  we  have  to  teach  the  teacher  how  to 
expose  the  child  to  the  various  activities  and 
guide  his  interest  so  that  it  will  be  purposeful. 
The  school  can  thus  become  a_sifter  where  chil- 
dren unconsciously  as  they  live  along  from  day 
to  day  are  choosing  the  ways  in  which  they  can 
best  serve  both  themselves  and  their  community 
as  workers  and  citizens  in  the  great  scheme. 

The  papers  on  the  Gary  schools  are  reprinted 
not  because  I  wish  to  exploit  the  system  or  its 
superintendent,  but  because  of  the  usefulness 
of  a  concrete  example  to  hang  wandering  theory 
to.  The  schools  of  Mr.  Wirt's  conception,  in 
spite  of  many  inadequacies  of  realization,  still 
seem  to  me  the  happiest  framework  I  have  yet 
found  in  the  American  public  school  for  the  ful- 
fillment of  the  new  educational  ideals.  No  one 
can  deny  that  in  the  actual  schools  much  of  the 


viii  PEEFACE 

old  unconsciousness  and  regimentation  still  stick 
their  unwelcome  head  through,  but  my  some- 
what naive  impressions  do  reflect,  I  am  sure,  a 
spirit  which  is  there,  and  a  possibility  that  is 
very  near  for  the  American  community  to  catch. 
To  praise  one  thing,  however,  is  not  to  damn 
everything  else,  and  it  would  be  false  to  pre- 
tend that  almost  every  city  in  our  country  has 
not  latent  within  its  system  the  embryo  of  the 
modern  school.  Some  are  simply  more  con- 
scious than  others.  Some  actually  envisage 
education  as  living. 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I    Education  and  Living 3 

II  The  Self-Conscious  School  ...    11 

III  The  Wasted  Years 18     , 

IV  PuzzuE — Education 26 

V  Learning  Out  of  School  ....     32  * 

VI    In  a  Schoolroom 41 

VII    The  Cult  of  the  Best 49 

VIII    Education  in  Taste 57 

IX  Universal  Service  and  Education    .     66 

X  The  Schools  from  the  Outside  .     .     77 

XI  The  Portland  School  Survey     .     .     84 

XII  What  Is  Experimental  Education?    91 

XIII  The  Organic  School 100 

XIV  Communities  for  Children     .     .     .  104 
XV  Keally  Public  Schools     ....  116 

XVI  Apprentices  to  the  School    .     .     .  127 


CONTENTS       ^ 

PAGE 

XVII    The  Natural  School 136 

XVIII  The  Democratic  School    ....  146 

XIX    The  Trained  Mind 154 

XX    CiAss  AND  School 161 

i 

XXI  A  Policy  in  Vocational  Education  .  173 

J 

XXII  An  Issue  in  Vocational  Education  .  182 

XXIII  Organized  Labor  on  Education    .     .  189 

XXIV  Education  for  Work     .      .     .     .     .197 
XXV    Continuation  Schools 206 

XXVI  Who  Owns  the  Universities  .      .     .  215 

XXVII    The  Undergraduate 222 

•      XXVIII  Medievalism  in  the  Colleges  .     .     .  230 


EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 


EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 


EDUCATION   AND   LIVING 

WHAT  is  the  current  broadening  of  the 
public  school — the  bringing  in  of  gym- 
nasiums and  pools,  shops  and  gardens,  dra- 
matics and  organized  play — ^but  a  new  effort  to 
realize  the  school  as  more  a  life  and  less  an  insti- 
tution? Are  we  not  getting  a  little  restless  over 
the  resemblance  of  our  schools  to  penitentiaries, 
reformatories,  orphan  asylums,  rather  than  to 
free  and  joyous  communities?  A  school  sys- 
tem whose  object  was  little  more  than  to  abol- 
ish illiteracy  and  prepare  the  more  fortunate 
for  college  was  bound  to  fall  an  easy  prey  to 
the  mechanical  organi2?er.  Education  in  this 
country  has  been  one-sidedly  professionalized. 
The  machinery  was  developed  before  the  mov- 
ing ideals  were  worked  out.  Professional  edu- 
cators have  worked  too  much  for  a  logical  sys- 

3 


4  LDVCATiON  AND  LIVING 

tern  rather  than  for  an  experimental  adjustment 
to  the  life  needs  of  individual  children.  We 
have  achieved  a  democratic  education  in  the 
sense  that  common  schooling  is  practically 
within  the  reach  of  every  one.  But  a  demo- 
cratic education  in  the  sense  of  giving  equal 
opportunities  to  each  child  of  finding  in  the 
school  that  life  and  training  which  he  peculiarly 
needs,  has  still  to  be  generally  worked  for.  The 
problem  of  American  education  is  now  to  trans- 
form an  institution  into  a  life. 

Let  us  not  deny  the  value  of  that  emphasis 
on  administration.  The  slow  progress  from  the 
diffuse  district  school  to  the  well  organized  state 
system  represents  the  welding  of  a  powerful 
instrument  for  a  future  democracy  to  use.  Cen- 
tralized and  efficient  administration  is  indis- 
pensable for  insuring  educational  benefits  to  all. 
But  there  is  a  danger  that  we  shall  create 
capable  administrators  faster  than  we  create 
imaginative  educators.  It  is  so  easy  to  forget 
that  this  tightening  of  the  machinery  is  only  in 
order  that  the  product  may  be  finer  and  richer. 
Unless  it  does  so  result  in  more  creative  life 
it  will  be  a  detriment  rather  than  a  good.  For 
it  is  too  easy  to  make  the  running  of  the  ma- 
chine, the  juggling  with  schedules  and  promo- 


EDUCATION  AND  LIVING  5 

tions  and  curricula  and  courses  and  credits,  the 
end.  To  institutionalize  a  social  function  is  al- 
ways the  line  of  least  resistance. 

We  are  becoming  used  to  the  impressive 
schoolhouses  that  tower  over  the  unkempt  and 
fragile  houses  of  our  American  towns.  The 
school  already  overshadows  the  church.  If  this , 
means  that  the  school  is  the  most  important 
place  in  the  community,  then  it  is  a  hopeful  sign. 
But  if  its  slightly  forbidding  bulk  means  simply 
that  there  is  another  institution  to  put  people 
through  a  uniform  process,  or  indeed  through 
any  kind  of  process,  then  we  are  no  further 
along.  The  educators  of  the  last  generation, 
whether  from  false  ideas  of  democracy  or  from 
administrative  convenience  or  necessity,  im- 
posed deadly  uniformities  of  subject  matter  and 
method  on  the  children  in  the  schools.  They 
assumed  that  a  uniform  process  would  give  uni- 
form results.  But  children  are  infinitely  varied 
in  temperament  and  capacity  and  interests.  So 
the  uniform  process  gave  the  most  wildly  hetero- 
geneous results.  And  the  present  unrest  arises" 
from  our  amazed  dissatisfaction  that  so  ad- 
mirable and  long-continued  a  public-school  edu- 
cation should  have  left  the  masses  of  children 
so  little  stimulated  and  trained. 


6  EDUCATION  AND  LIVINa 

The  pseudo-science  of  education  under  which 
most  of  us  were  brought  up  assumed  that  chil- 
dren were  empty  vessels  to  be  filled  by  knowl- 
edge. Teachers  and  parents  still  feel  that  to 
cut  down  an  arithmetic  hour  to  forty-five  min- 
utes is  to  deprive  the  child  of  a  fourth  of  his 
education.  But  children  are  not  empty  vessels, 
nor  are  they  automatic  machines  which  can  be 
wound  up  and  set  running  on  a  track  by  the 
teacher.  They  are  pushing  wills  and  desires  and 
curiosities.  They  are  living,  growing  things, 
and  they  need  nothing  so  much  as  a  place  where 
they  can  grow.  They  live  as  wholes  far  more 
than  older  people  do,  and  they  cannot  be  made 
to  become  minds  and  minds  alone  for  four  or 
five  hours  a  day — that  is,  without  stultification. 
The  school  forgets  that  we  are  only  accidentally 
intellectual,  that  our  other  impulses  are  far 
more  imperious.  Because  a  teacher  can  secure 
outward  order,  it  does  not  mean  that  she  has 
harmonized  the  child's  personality.  She  has 
not  the  least  clue  to  the  riot  or  apathy  or  de- 
lusion that  may  be  going  on  inside  him.  She 
may  easily  become  a  drill-sergeant,  but  she  must 
not  think  that  she  has  thereby  become  an  educa- 
tional scientist. 

To  become  that  she  will  have  to  think  of  the 


EDUCATION  AND  LIVING  7 

school  as  a  place  where  children  spend  their 
time  living  not  as  artificially  segregated  minds 
but  as  human  things.  She  would  have  to  judge 
their  activities  in  terms  of  an  interesting  life.^ 
And  that  involves  good  health,  play,  sport, 
constructive  work,  talk,  questioning,  exercise, 
friendship,  personal  expression,  as  well  as  read- 
ing and  learning.  A  place  where  children 
really  lived  would  be  a  place  that  gave  oppor- 
tunities for  all  these  activities  to  just  the  ex- 
tent that  children  were  individually  capable  of 
expressing  themselves.  Children  want  to  be 
busy  together,  they  want  to  try  their  hand  at 
tools  and  materials,  they  waiit  to  find  out  what 
older  people  do  and  watch  them  at  it.  They 
have  to  flounder  about  and  have  all  sorts  of 
experiences  before  they  touch  their  spring  of 
interest  and  face  their  real  direction.  All  their 
education  is  really  acquired  in  the  same  ran- 
dom way  that  the^feaby  learns  to  control  his 
movements  and  r^lpond  to  his  environment. 
No  matter  how  the  school  tries  to  organize  their 
learning,  and  feed  it  to  them  in  graduated  doses, 
this  way  of  trial  and  error  is  really  the  one  by 
which  they  will  learn.  You  have  no  way  of 
guaranteeing  that  they  will  learn  what  you  think 
you  are  teaching  them.    What  you  can  do  is 


8  EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

to  put  them  in  a  controlled  environment  where 
they  will  most  frequently  strike  the  electric  con- 
tact of  curiosity  and  response,  and  get  experi- 
ences that  thrill  with  meaning  for  them. 
■■  Life  in  its  lowest  terms  is  a  matter  of  pass- 
ing the  time.  It  would  be  wejl  if  educators 
would  more  often  remember  this.  If  they  did, 
would  they  not  examine  more  carefully  the  life* 
which  they  provide  for  growing  youth?  Col- 
lege and  high  school  life  is  reasonably  antisep- 
tic, it  is  not  oppressive,  it  is  not  particularly 
arbitrary  or  shabby.  But  compared  abstractly 
with  what  might  be  a  good  life,  given  the  in- 
terests and  outlook  and  needed  training  of 
youth,  would  it  not  seem  a  little  sorry?  Is  it 
not  a  travesty,  except  for  the  few,  on  a  really 
stimulating  and  creative  way  of  spending  time? 
Suppose  educators  seriously  measured  their 
^  schools  by  this  standard  of  the  good  life.  Sup- 
pose we  really  tried  to  carry  out  the  principle 
that  the  secret  of  life  is  to*^pass  time  worthily. 
Most  of  this  current  educational  interest  is 
another  stab  at  the  age-long  problem  of  making 
education  synonymous  with  living.  We  are  re- 
discovering the  fact  that  we  learn  only  as  we 
desire,  as  we  seek  to  understand  or  as  we  are 
busy.    We  are  trying  to  make  the  school  a  place 


EDUCATION  AND  LIVING  9 

where  children  cannot  escape  doing  these  things. 
We  see  now  that  education  has  grown  up  in  this 
country  in  a  separate  institutional  compartment, 
jealously  apart  from  the  rest  of  the  community 
life.  It  has  developed  its  own  technique,  its  own 
professional  spirit.^  Its  outlines  are  cold  and 
logical.  It  is  far  the  best  ordered  of  our  in- 
stitutions. Its  morale  is  the  nearest  thing  we 
have  to  compulsory  military  service.  There  is 
something  remote  and  antiseptic  about  even  our 
best  schools.  They  contrast  strangely  with  the 
color  and  confusion  of  the  rest  of  our  American 
life.  The  bare  class-rooms,  the  stiff  seats,  the 
austere  absence  of  beauty,  suggest  a  hospital 
where  painful  if  necessary  intellectual  opera- 
tions are  going  on.  Additions  of  gymnasiums 
and  shops  and  studios  to  such  a  school  will  do 
little  to  set  the  current  of  life  flowing  again. 
The  whole  school  must  be  loosened  up,  the  stiff 
forms  made  flexible,  children  thought  of  as  in- 
dividuals and  not  as  ^^ classes.''  Thus  new  ac- 
tivities must  be  woven  into  a  genuine  child- 
community  life.  These  things  must  be  the  con- 
tacts with  experience  that  waken  and  focus  chil- 
dren's interests.  They  must  be  opportunities 
for  spontaneous  living. 
The  school  constantly  encroaches  on  the  home. 


10  EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

It  provides  play  and  work  opportunities  that 
even  well-to-do  homes  cannot  provide.  It  must 
take  over  too  the  free  and  comradely  atmos- 
phere of  the  homes  and  the  streets  where  chil- 1|. 
dren  play.  Let  teachers  face  the  fact  that  they 
cannot  teach  masses  of  children  anything  with 
the  assurance  that  they  will  really  assimilate  it. 
What  they  can  do  is  to  fill  the  school  with  all 
kinds  of  typical  experiences,  and  see  that  chil- 
dren are  exposed  to  them.  They  can  see  that 
children  have  a  chance  to  dabble  in  them,  touch 
tools  and  growing  things,  read  books,  draw, 
sw^im,  play  and  sing.  Let  the  teacher  cleverly 
supervise  and  coordinate,  see  that  the  children's 
interests  are  drawn  out,  and  that  what  they  do 
contributes  toward  their  growth.  In  the  last 
analysis,  each  child  will  have  to  educate  him- 
self up  to  his  capacity.  He  can  only  educate 
himself  by  living.  The  school  will  be  the  place 
where  he  lives  most  worthily. 
(  Our  best  American  public  schools  are  already 
in  sight  of  such  an  ideal.  Americans  need  more 
than  anything  to  learn  how  to  live.  This  is  the 
first  business  of  education. 


I- 

I 


n 

THE   SELF-CONSCIOUS  SCHOOL 

IN  the  educational  excitement  of  to-day  we 
scarcely  realize  how  far  the  modern  school 
is  passing  out  of  that  era  when  the  program 
for  work  and  study  was  carefully  constructed 
with  a  view  to  the  child 's  '  'preparation  for  life. ' ' 
Educators  saw  the  world  as  divided  into  two 
radically  different  classes,  adults  and  school- 
children. The  adults  were  functioning  in  a  def- 
inite sphere,  using  a  certain  self-contained  and 
common  body  of  knowledge  to  do  their  work 
and  make  their  way  in  the  world.  The  children, 
on  the  other  hand,  were  waiting  like  the  little 
unborn  souls  in  ''The  Blue  Bird,"  to  take  their 
places  in  that  active  world.  If  their  parents 
were  using  knowledge  as  a  current  intellectual 
coin  with  which  experience  could  be  bought  and 
social  exchange  effected,  the  child  who  had  any 
chance  of  succeeding  as  an  adult  would  have 
to  be  put  in  possession  of  as  much  of  this  cur- 
rent coin  as  he  could  hold,  quite  regardless  of 

11 


12  EDUCATION  AND  LIVINa 

his  own  enthusiasm  for  it  or  his  own  conscious- 
ness of  what  it  was  all  about. 

The  free  public  school,  therefore,  became  the 
place  where  children  took  into  themselves  such 
automatically  usable  knowledge  as  would  be  im- 
portant for  them  in  the  remote  future  of  their 
active  adulthood.  Since  book-knowledge  had 
acquired  honorific  distinction  as  the  badge  of  a 
leisure  class — and  did  not  every  democratic  par- 
ent wish  his  child  to  ^^rise  in  the  world"? — and 
since  it  was  of  all  knowledge  the  most  easily 
negotiable  in  the  form  of  simple  processes  and 
facts,  this  type  of  knowledge  became  the  stock 
of  the  school.  Then  at  some  time  a  not  un- 
intelligent attempt  was  supposedly  made  to  com- 
pare this  current  stock  of  intellectual  paper 
money  with  the  specie  circulating  outside  in  the 
community  at  large,  to  see  whether  the  school 
reserve  was  accurate  and  sufficient.  This  atten- 
tion lapsed,  however,  and  the  curriculum  be- 
came a  closed  system,  handed  down  to  the  un- 
critical and  unconscious  child  with  the  authority 
of  prestige  and  the  sanctions  of  school  disci- 
pline. 

In  this  unconscious  school,  knowledge  was 
presented  to  us  not  as  acquaintance  with  things 
but  with  *  *  subjects. ' '     Text-books  were  given  us 


THE  SELF-CONSCIOUS  SCHOOL     13 

holding  the  golden  lore,  and  education  became 
the  slow  nibbling  away  at  their  facts  for  six  to 
twelve  years.  We  came  to  think  of  ourselves 
as  cupboards  in  which  were  laboriously  stored 
bundles  of  knowledge.  We  knew  dimly  the 
shape  of  the  articles  and  the  distinction  of  the 
materials  within.  But  we  never  expected  to  see 
the  contents  until  we  were  grown,  when  we 
would  joyfully  open  our  packages  and  use  them 
to  the  infinite  glory  of  our  worldly  success  and 
happiness.  But  it  was  a  slow  child  who  did 
not  begin  to  suspect,  long  before  his  shelves 
were  full,  that  most  of  his  adult  friends  had 
lost  no  time,  when  their  schooldays  were  over, 
in  locking  their  cupboards  and  leaving  their 
bundles  to  the  dust  and  worms. 

The  fine  technique  of  the  unconscious  school 
as  worked  out  by  educators  in  normal  schools 
and  teachers'  colleges  in  the  last  forty  years 
can  be  read  in  any  current  school  survey. 
Here  the  coincidence  of  work  and  study  with 
the  child's  interests  is  accidental.  Indeed, 
many  parents  and  teachers  are  still  opposed  to 
making  too  large  a  part  of  the  curriculum  ap- 
peal to  the  child's  ephemeral  interests.  Dis- 
cipline is  still  thought  of  not  as  willed  skill, 
which  it  is,  but  as  the  ability  to  do  painful  things. 


14  EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

A  world  where  children  do  joyfully  and  well 
what  interests  them,  instead  of  what  is  **good" 
for  them  (because  unpleasant),  still  excites  the 
envious  mistrust  of  an  older  generation. 

Yet  the  transformation.from  the  unconscious 
school  to  the  self-conscious  school  is  the  very 
kernel  of  the  present  educational  excitement. 
The  new  schools  which  arouse  enthusiasm  are 
those  in  which  the  child  is  learning  what  has 
meaning  to  him  as  a  child.  He  no  longer  does 
things  because  it  is  the  ^^ teacher's  way."  That 
old  perverted  honor  of  the  teacher  never  to  ad- 
mit that  she  is  wrong  lest  the  child's  confidence 
be  disturbed  and  he  become  conscious  and  crit- 
ical of  the  methods  and  materials  of  his  ed- 
ucation, is  breaking  down.  We  are  learning 
that  in  the  unconscious  school  the  prizes  go 
to  the  docile  and  unquestioning,  not  to  those 
of  initiative  and  skill.  The  school  that 
keeps  children  in  ignorance  of  what  they  are 
doing  trains  them  for  an  uncritical  life  in  so- 
ciety. 

The  discovery  is  not  new  that  all  the  skill 
necessary  to  live  an  effective  life  in  America  to- 
day is  not  contained  in  a  few  readers,  arithme- 
tics, abridged  histories  and  geographies,  an  ele- 
mentary algebra  and  plane  geometry,  a  Latin, 


THE  SELF-CONSCIOUS  SCHOOL     15 

Greek,  or  German  grammar,  with  cuUings  from 
the  works  of  Caesar,  Virgil,  Xenophon,  Cicero 
and  Homer.  When  educators  found  that  adult 
life  overflowed  these  narrow  limits,  they  intro- 
duced manual  training,  gymnastics,  drawing  and 
music;  but  the  child  became  no  more  self-con- 
scious, for  these  were  merely  additional  '^sub- 
jects." The  radical  discovery  of  to-day  is  that 
the  adult  world  is  not  primarily  engaged  in 
turning  information  into  power.  The  adult 
rarely  has  a  historical  or  a  geographical  or  an 
arithmetical  thought  unconnected  with  experi- 
ence. What  he  does  is  to  work  very  concretely 
at  a  myriad  of  occupations,  intellectual  and  me- 
chanical, concerned  with  making  a  living, 
bringing  up  a  family,  dealing  with  people,  cast- 
ing a  vote,  reading  newspapers.  He  has  a 
great  diversity  of  horizons,  and  the  most  effec- 
tive people  are  those  who  react  most  intelli- 
gently to  their  experience  as  a  whole.  Power 
and  information  increase  together,  not  one  at 
a  time.  The  effective  adult  is  a  self-conscious 
personality.  The  only  school  which  can  be  a 
genuine  preparation  for  life  is  a  self-conscious 
school.  The  child  must  learn  to  live  in  the  same 
kind  of  world  that  his  elders  live  in.  The  school 
must  be  the  community  in  which  his  child-life 


16  EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

develops.    His  play  and  work  must  be,  first  of 
all,  interesting  activity. 

Fortunately  the  modern  movement  to  make 
the  school  self-conscious  has  begun  at  the  bot- 
tom. The  four  earlier  years  of  the  public 
school  as  taught  by  recently  trained  teachers  are 
now  generally  filled,  even  in  conservative  city 
systems,  with  this  new  vivid  consciousness. 
Dramatization,  the  learning  of  reading  and  writ- 
ing and  arithmetic  through  play,  group-games 
and  folk-dancing,  gardening,  constructive  wood- 
working— all  this  is  a  sign  of  the  growing  self- 
consciousness  of  the  school.  In  the  more  ad- 
vanced schools,  shop  and  science  work,  commu- 
nity excursions,  illustrative  drawing  and  de- 
sign, fertilize  the  life  of  the  older  children. 
The  most  complete  self-consciousness  is  realized 
in  a  school  of  the  Wirt  type,  where  all  the 
varied  activities  are  arranged  to  contribute  to 
the  upkeep  or  enrichment  of  the  school  plant 
and  the  school  community.  For  the  older  chil- 
dren the  expanding  community  becomes  an  ex- 
tension of  the  school,  and  they  learn  the  opera- 
tion of  the  adult  world  by  going  out  to  see  the 
institutions  of  their  community  and  asking  ques- 
tions about  them.  In  the  self-conscious  school 
the  child's  own  curiosity  sets  the  cue,  and  the 


THE  SELF-CONSCIOUS  SCHOOL       17 

school's  work  is  to  provide  manifold  opportuni- 
ties for  the  satisfaction  of  that  curiosity. 

As  this  self -consciousness  spreads  up  through 
the  school  system,  we  should  get  a  new  type  of 
intelligence.  Children  will  get  a  sense  of  means 
used  for  ends,  and  this  sense  is  the  most  im- 
perative discipline  that  we  need.  A  revolution- 
ary reorganization  of  the  curriculum  will  be 
effected.  Already  unapplied  mathematics  and 
unrelated  classics  are  passing.  Yet  those  years 
which  should  most  closely  approximate  in  func- 
tion and  appreciation  and  in  intellectual  attitude 
the  adult  world  remain  unregenerated.  Little 
seems  to  have  been  done  to  alter  the  old  high 
school,  still  regarded  principally  as  the  gateway 
to  the  largely  unconscious  college.  As  a  com- 
munity of  adolescent  life,  meeting  sex-interests, 
new  idealisms  and  new  assertions,  it  is  a  failure. 
But  as  the  older  pedagogy  fades  out,  and  the 
younger  children  trained  in  the  self-conscious 
school  advance,  we  may  expect  a  new  orienta- 
tion for  the  older  years.  Meanwhile  our  most 
valuable  criterion  for  any  school,  public  or  pri- 
vate, city  or  rural,  is,  **How  far  towards  self- 
consciousness,  as  expressed  in  the  individual 
child  and  in  the  school  community  as  a  whol^ 
has  the  school  progressed? '^ 


m 

THE   WASTED   YEAES 

ONLY  one  child  out  of  fourteen  in  our  school 
system  ever  reaches  the  high  school; 
whatever  education  ninety  per  cent,  of  Ameri- 
can children  are  to  have  they  must  acquire 
before  they  are  fourteen  years  old.  So  ele- 
mentary a  fact  as  this,  it  would  seem,  should  be 
at  the  background  of  every  discussion  and  criti- 
cism of  the  public  schools.  Yet  the  most  cur- 
sory inspection  of  the  average  city  public  school 
shows  that  its  significance  has  only  recently  and 
very  dimly  been  realized. 

Indeed,  as  the  average  city  public  school  is  at 
present  organized,  there  is  every  reason  to 
believe  that  most  of  the  children  get  practically 
all  their  education  before  their  tenth  year. 
Limited  as  this  schooling  is,  they  do  not  by  any 
means  get  the  full  advantage  of  what  is  sup- 
posed to  be  given  them.  One  can  hardly  come 
from  a  study  of  the  everyday  classroom  work  of 
the  average  city  school  without  a  conviction  that 

18 


THE  WASTED  YEARS  19 

there  is  disastrous  intellectual  leakage  which 
has  been  strangely  ignored  by  educators. 

This  leakage  is  not  in  the  primary  school  and 
the  high  school.  For  the  teaching  of  ^Hhe  three 
E's"  American  normal  schools  and  training 
colleges  in  recent  years  have  worked  out  many 
admirable  techniques,  which  seem  to  have  been 
generally  adopted.  The  younger  generation  of 
teachers  is  doing  efficiently  its  work  of  giving 
the  child  a  mastery  of  these  essentials  of  civ- 
ilized intercourse.  The  present  primary  school 
on  its  intellectual  side  is  an  efficient  institution. 

Similarly  the  high  school  has  had  a  large 
amount  of  attention  and  skill  lavished  upon  it. 
Its  administrative  peculiar  problems  have  been 
studied  and  met.  The  best  high  schools  have 
been  made  to  approximate  elementary  colleges, 
with  well-rounded  courses  of  languages  and 
sciences,  of  artistic,  manual  and  physical  work. 
For  the  highly  selected  group  which  reaches  the 
high  school  it  provides  an  excellent  purely  in- 
tellectual curriculum,  both  for  higher  study  and 
for  social  orientation. 

Between  the  primary  school  and  the  high, 
school,  however,  there  lies  a  desert  waste  of 
four  years,  the  significance  and  possibilities  of 
which  seem  to  have  been  scarcely  considered. 


20  EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

They  are  the  most  urgent  years  of  all,  for  in 
them  the  educator  must  give  compensation  to 
the  children  who  are  forced  to  leave  school  for 
the  opportunities  they  are  to  miss.  Yet  these 
middle  years  of  what  used  to  be  called  the 
^* grammar  school"  are  now  left  not  only  un- 
motivated, but  without  any  genuine  educational 
function.  Instead  of  being  prophetic  of  the 
future  they  merely  drag  along  the  relics  of  the 
past.  Some  schools,  it  is  true,  have  timidly 
brought  down  the  beginning  of  high  school 
studies  into  the  lower  grades,  but  in  general  the 
^^ grammar  school"  merely  continues  the  inter- 
ests of  the  primary  school  on  substantially  the 
same  lines. 

Fifteen  years  ago,  when  I  went  to  school, 
there  may  have  been  some  excuse  for  this  sys- 
tem. Teachers  may  have  been  correct  in  their 
belief  that  it  took  the  average  child  eight  years 
to  learn  arithmetic,  reading,  writing,  spelling, 
and  a  smattering  of  history  and  geography. 
To-day  such  an  assumption  is  ridiculous.  I 
have  seen  children  in  large  classes  in  an  ordi- 
nary city  school  system  learn  all  the  elements 
of  *'the  three  E's"  in  less  than  six  months. 
The  clear  writing  and  accurate  reading  of  lit- 
tle children  in  the  first  grade  who  have  only 


THE  WASTED  YEARS  21 

been  going  to  school  for  a  few  months  is  aston- 
ishing. It  suggests  that  Mme.  Montessori  could 
scarcely  have  known  of  the  excellence  of  ele- 
mentary methods  in  this  country  when  she 
urged  her  ideas  as  revolutionary.  For  these 
small  children,  as  for  the  Montessori  child,  the 
competitive  number- work,  the  writing  from  dic- 
tation, the  oral  reading,  the  spelling,  seemed  not 
drudgery  but  interesting  activity.  Astonish- 
ing, too,  was  the  uniform  excellence  of  the  re- 
sults. 

Now  it  is  little  more  than  a  truism  to  say  that 
^^the  three  E's"  have  not  really  been  learned 
until  they  have  become  automatic,  that  reading, 
writing  and  arithmetic  are  not  ends  in  them- 
selves but  merely  the  tools  for  work.  To  give 
command  of  the  tools  is  the  peculiar  task  of  the 
primary  school,  and  of  the  primary  school  only. 
If  children  can  be  given  an  acquaintance  with 
^^the  three  R's"  in  six  months,  it  does  not  seem 
too  much  to  expect  them  to  acquire  this  auto- 
matic command  in  two  or  three  years.  It  is  in- 
credible that  the  child  should  have  to  study 
eight  years  for  this.  Yet  our  elementary 
schools  continue  to  assume  that  every  child  is 
thus  mentally  backward.  In  the  higher  grades 
we  find  the  same  subjects,  formal  reading  les- 


22  EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

sons,  formal  penmanship  lessons,  formal  arith- 
metic and  spelling.  But  something  has  hap- 
pened to  these  children.  They  are  distinctly 
less  interested,  less  interesting,  and  even  less 
capable  than  the  smaller  children.  It  is  de- 
pressing to  realize  that  the  elementary  school 
has  existed  only  to  turn  first-grade  children  into 
seyenth-grade  children,  and  to  realize  that  most 
of  the  latter  are  nearing  the  end  of  their  school- 
days and  will  pass  out  into  the  world  with 
that  intellectual  listlessness  and  lack  of  com- 
mand. 

Let  me  suggest  what  has  happened  to  these 
children.  Formal  work,  the  learning  of  any 
technique,  is  apt  to  be  pleasurable  as  long 
as  we  can  feel  ourselves  gradually  acquiring  a 
command  over  our  instrument.  But  after  we 
have  acquired  the  technique  and  can  rely  upon 
our  skill,  there  is  no  gain  in  continuing  formal 
exercises.  There  is  only  gain  in  using  our  skill 
in  real  work,  the  work  for  which  we  have  stud- 
ied. If  we  have  studied  a  language,  we  do  not 
keep  mulling  over  rules  of  grammar  and  vocab- 
ularies, but  we  try  as  soon  as  possible  to  read. 
The  means  now  gives  way  to  the  end. 

We  can  understand  one  cause  for  that  situa- 
tion of  which  employers  complain  when  children 


THE  WASTED  YEARS  23 

come  to  them  from  the  public  schools  unpre- 
pared in  the  very  elements  of  education.  In  the 
bad  memories,  flimsy  information,  inability  to 
write  or  spell  or  figure  accurately,  is  found  the 
very  common  indictment  of  the  public  school. 
The  criticism  is  usually  that  the  groundwork 
has  been  poor,  that  the  children  have  not  been 
trained  in  the  fundamentals.  If  my  thesis  is 
correct,  the  groundwork  has  not  been  poor.  Of 
recent  years,  it  has,  on  the  contrary,  been  un- 
usually excellent  and  thorough.  The  leakage 
has  come  in  the  middle  years,  which  have  sim- 
ply disintegrated  the  foundations.  The  school 
has  sharpened  the  mind,  and  then,  by  providing 
only  a  repetition  of  formal  work  instead  of 
practical  opportunity  for  use  of  the  acquired 
technique,  has  proceeded  to  dull  it.  Grammar 
has  been  studied,  literature  in  a  curiously 
desiccated  fashion,  political  history,  esoteric 
branches  of  arithmetic.  Subjects  like  these 
have  filled  the  time  that  might  have  been  given 
to  copious  individual  reading,  to  writing  about 
what  is  read  or  experienced,  to  practical  num- 
ber-work in  simple  statistics  or  accounting. 
Time  which  might  have  been  given,  through  use 
of  pictures  and  newspapers,  to  the  cultivation 
of  an  imaginative  historical  and  geographical 


24  EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

background,  has  gone  into  aimless  memorizing, 
or  into  a  glib  use  of  words  and  phrases. 

This  situation  is  all  the  more  preposterous 
because  both  the  high  school  and  college  are  full 
of  studies  that  could  be  begun  by  the  intelligent 
child  as  soon  as  a  technical  proficiency  in  ''the 
three  E's"  was  once  obtained.  What  psycho- 
logical law  declares  that  before  fourteen  a  hu- 
man being  is  incapable  of  learning  languages, 
the  sciences,  or  even  the  sociological  studies,  but 
that  after  fourteen  he  is  capable  of  learning  all 
these  things?  As  a  matter  of  fact,  most  of 
these  ^^ higher"  studies  could  be  much  more 
easily  assimilated  by  the  quick  and  curious  mind 
of  the  younger  child  than  by  the  older.  And 
for  the  worker  in  any  field,  acquaintance  with 
elementary  science  and  the  organization  of  so- 
ciety is  so  emphatically  important  that  we  can- 
not afford  to  let  the  vast  majority  of  our  citi- 
zens remain  all  their  lives  ignorant  of  their 
very  terms.  In  the  four  years  of  the  *' gram- 
mar school"  an  intelligent  interest  could  be 
awakened  in  these  fields,  and  the  main  outlines 
grasped.  This  would  not  mean  the  addition  of 
many  new  subjects  to  an  already  crowded  cur- 
riculum. It  would  merely  mean  the  dropping 
of  *Hhe  three  E's"  back  into  their  rightful  place 


THE  WASTED  YEARS  25 

in  the  primary  school.  It  would  lighten  rather 
than  overburden  the  school.  We  should  then 
have  a  fair  division  of  labor  and  function  be- 
tween the  schools,  to  the  profit  of  both. 

If  there  is  one  criticism  of  the  public  school 
system  on  its  intellectual  side  that  can  justly  be 
made  general,  it  is  this  of  the  wasted  years. 
The  school  has  found  itself  in  this  paradoxical 
situation,  that  the  more  excellent  became  its  pri- 
mary methods  the  poorer  became  the  product 
at  the  end  of  the  system.  This  paradox  is  ex- 
plained. Educators  have  simply  failed  to  rec- 
ognize that  the  sharper  they  made  the  elemen- 
tary tools  and  the  better  the  facilities  of  obtain- 
ing skill  in  their  use,  the  more  varied  and  im- 
mediate should  be  the  work  upon  which  the  tools 
are  to  be  exercised.  They  have  failed  to  pro- 
vide this  work.  They  have  left  a  leakage  iuv 
public  education  which  has  almost  defeated  its 
own  ends. 


IV 

PUZZLE-EDUCATION 

HOW  righteously  indignant  did  our  teach- 
ers use  to  be  if  we  ever  precociously  ob- 
jected to  learning  our  mathematics  and  gram- 
mar in  school  on  the  ground  that  if  we  were 
going  to  be  doctors  or  policemen  we  should 
never  have  any  use  when  we  grew  up  for  that 
kind  of  knowledge !  Were  we  not  entirely  too 
young  to  know  at  all  what  kind  of  knowledge  we 
should  need  when  we  did  grow  up  I  Did  not  our 
teachers  impress  upon  us  that  in  some  mysteri- 
ous way  all  was  grist  that  came  to  our  intel- 
lectual mill  ?  Did  we  wish  to  know  merely  what 
we  could  use  in  the  daily  grubbing  of  bread  and 
butter?  Was  not  the  fine  flower  of  education 
knowledge  learned  for  its  own  sake?  We  could 
thus  be  assured,  as  we  cubed  our  roots  or  dia- 
grammed our  sentences,  that  all  this  work  was 
'^ training  the  mind,''  so  that  we  could  almost 
feel  our  mental  muscles  growing  in  strength 
and  elasticity.    We  were  top  young  to  see  it 

26 


PUZZLE-EDUCATION  27 

then,  but  some  day  we  should  be  heartily  grate- 
ful to  our  painstaking  teachers.  Some  day, 
when  we  were  successful  men,  we  should  come 
to  appreciate  the  superior  wisdom  of  this  edu- 
cational system  against  which  our  rational  lit- 
tle wills  so  smolderingly  rebelled. 

In  those  days,  would  we  not  have  given  our 
young  chances  of  promotion  to  see  ranged  up 
before  the  teacher  a  group  of  great  grown  men, 
the  successful  ones  of  the  earth,  to  be  put 
through  the  paces  at  which  we  kicked?  Would 
it  not  have  tickled  us  to  see  a  class  consist- 
ing of  a  state  senator,  a  former  lieutenant- 
governor,  a  manufacturer,  a  city  official,  a 
banker,  a  physician,  a  merchant,  a  lawyer,  an 
editor,  an  engineer  and  a  clergyman,  trying  to 
spell  daguerreotype  and  paradigm,  reconnais- 
sance and  erysipelas,  guessing  at  the  distance 
in  degrees  from  Portugal  to  the  Ural  Moun- 
tains, locating  the  desert  of  Atacama  and  the 
Pamir  Plateau,  expressing  150°  Cent,  in  terms 
of  Fahrenheit,  and  finding  the  area  of  the  base 
of  a  cylindrical  1  gal.  can,  10  ins.  high?  If  it 
was  true  that  we  should  all  find  this  knowledge 
useful  some  day,  then  it  would  be  preeminently 
these  men  who  were  finding  it  useful  now. 

Let  the  news  go  forth  to  all  the  children  of 


28  EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

the  land  who  are  questioning  the  why  and 
wherefore  of  what  they  are  learning,  that  this 
thing  has  actually  been  done.  The  eleven  men 
have  been  assembled  in  Springfield,  111.,  and 
have  had  put  to  them  these  questions  and  oth- 
ers, all  taken  from  the  prescribed  work  of  the 
local  public  schools.  The  class  constituted  one 
of  those  inquiries  conducted  with  the  deadly 
accuracy  of  a  laboratory  experiment  by  the 
Eussell  Sage  Foundation.  The  results,  it  need 
hardly  be  said,  were  a  complete  demonstration 
of  the  intuition  of  our  childish  precocity.  Not 
one  of  these  eleven  successful  and  intelligent 
gentlemen  made  so  much  as  a  passing  mark  in 
any  subject.  In  the  spelling-match  the  best 
record  was  six  words  out  of  ten,  while  one  man, 
probably  the  editor,  failed  in  every  word. 
Only  one  of  the  pupils  knew  the  capital  of  Mon- 
tenegro, while  neither  he  nor  any  of  the  others 
had  the  faintest  reaction  to  Atacama  or  the 
Pamir  Plateau,  much  less  to  the  length  of  South 
America  or  the  distance  in  degrees  from  Portu- 
gal to  the  Ural  Mountains.  Only  one  of  the 
eleven  could  do  the  thermometer  problem — he 
must  have  been  in  Paris  once  in  January — and 
not  one  knew  the  specific  gravity  of  alcohol 
when  2  liters  weigh  1.58  kgms.    As  for  the  ten 


PUZZLE-EDUCATION  29 

historical  dates  selected  from  ninety-one,  the 
only  date  that  as  many  as  ten  men  knew  was  the 
attack  on  Sumter.  Only  one  identified  the  date 
of  the  Mexican  "War,  only  one  the  surrender  of 
Cornwallis. 

It  must  have  seemed  very  curious  to  the 
eleven  to  be  presented  with  these  questions,  and 
then  have  the  answers  labeled  ^* knowledge." 
How  many  of  them  drew  the  conclusion  that  our 
public  schools  were  little  more  in  the  higher 
reaches  than  a  glorified  puzzle-party,  where 
recitation  is  often  more  like  a  guessing  of  rid- 
dles, or  trying  to  discover  the  answer  from  the 
teacher's  tone,  or  the  putting  together  of  a 
puzzle-picture?  Look  at  the  average  school 
text-book,  with  its  neat  and  logical  divisions, 
and  see  if  you  can't  hear  the  dry  crackle  of  the 
author's  wit  as  he  has  worked  out  his  ingenious 
riddles,  pieced  his  cunning  examples  together, 
hunted  the  dictionary  for  words  to  spell,  dis- 
sected his  history,  carved  up  a  continent.  The 
intellect  feeds  on  syllogisms.  Syllogisms  are 
so  much  easier  than  appreciations.  And  really 
it  is  far  easier  to  reason  than  to  interpret.  In 
the  first  you  have  merely  to  follow  the  beaten 
track,  in  the  other  you  must  break  new  paths 
and  put  the  thing  in  your  own  new  language. 


30  EDUCATION  AND  LIVINa 

Yet  this  whirling  around  of  the  mental  engine 
with  the  belting  off  is  represented  to  us  as  a 
process  of  '^training  the  mind."  You  might  as 
well  say  that  an  athlete  could  best  train  his  legs 
by  standing  on  his  head  and  waving  them. 

It  is  this  scheme  of  puzzle-education  which 
this  Springfield  inquiry — a  characteristic  flash, 
we  take  it,  of  American  genius — has  so  tellingly 
shown  up.  And  this  riddle-curriculum  tends  to 
get  worse  instead  of  better  as  the  science  of 
text-bookmaking  waxes  and  the  machinery  of 
scientific  pedagogy  accumulates.  The  avowed 
aim  of  teachers  and  training-colleges  in  recent 
years  has  been  to  discover  pedagogical  methods 
that  would  -do  the  work  regardless  of  the  per- 
sonality of  the  teacher.  The  riotous  absurdi- 
ties of  this  scheme  are  being  revealed  by  such 
inquiries  as  these  in  Springfield.  They  sug- 
gest that  the  policy  of  having  our  next  genera- 
tion's mental  attitudes,  stock  of  information, 
personal  qualities,  and  moral  biases  cultivated 
by  unimaginative  teachers  whose  intellectual 
capacity  has  been  just  sufficient  to  acquire  a  few 
routine  methods  of  *^ conducting"  a  class  and 
keeping  order  in  a  group  of  restless  children, 
may  have  become  antiquated.  Our  genuine  edu- 
cation— that  is,  a  familiarity  with  the  world  we 


PUZZLE-EDUCATION  31 

live  in — must  wait  until  we  get  out  of  school. 
That  may  partly  explain  why  most  children  are 
so  anxious  to  leave. 

Some  people  might  find  in  this  inquiry  not  so 
much  an  evidence  of  the  inefficiency  of  our  pub- 
lic schools  as  of  how  little  intellectual  baggage 
one  needs  to  become  successful  and  eminent  in/ 
these  United  States.  But  this  is  in  reality  only 
to  make  a  heavier  indictment.  It  is  still  pri- 
marily the  schools  that  have  Failed  to  make  the 
intellectual  baggage  important  to  the  minds  of 
their  pupils,  that  have  left  uncultivated  their 
tastes  and  horizons.  It  is  for  this  reason  that 
our  American  intellectual  background  is  so 
relatively  thin. 


LEARNIlSrG  OUT   OF   SCHOOL 

AEECENT  correspondent  of  the  *^New  Ee- 
public  ''  columns  declares  that  the  real 
puzzle  in  education  is  as  to  content.  She  asks 
us  to  outline  the  facts  we  have  found  of  value, 
so  that  she  may  be  sure,  as  she  confesses  she  is 
not  now  sure,  what  children  should  know  when 
they  leave  school. 

I  search  the  memory  of  my  nine  years  in  the 
public  schools,  and  wonder  what  I  really  learned 
there.  I  must  have  learned  to  read  and  write 
and  spell  and  work  sums,  for  I  can  do  all  those 
things  now;  but  I  came  out  with  no  connected 
sense  of  my  country's  history  or  that  of  any 
other,  and  if  I  had  any  geographical  grasp,  it 
came  only  from  a  certain  abnormal  delight  I 
took  in  poring  over  maps  by  myself.  Algebra, 
geometry  and  physics  I  recall  to  have  passed 
before  my  attention.  I  was  a  very  dutiful 
child,  and  it  was  my  moral  rather  than  my 
intellectual   sense   which   enabled   me   to   get 


LEARNING  OUT  OF  SCHOOL        33 

'^marks''  in  these  subjects.  I  cannot  say  that 
they  were  ^^ learned,"  in  the  sense  of  being 
woven  into  experience  in  any  way.  Latin 
rather  appealed  to  me,  chiefly  because  of  its 
elegance  of  form,  which  I  remember  to  have 
been  curiously  reinforced  by  the  aesthetic 
format  of  the  Collar  and  Daniell's  text-book  we 
used.  Certain  English  classics  appeared  like 
dim  ghosts  on  my  horizon.  At  no  time  could 
I  have  given  an  intelligent  account  of  the  plot 
or  argument  of  any  of  the  books  we  read  in 
Latin,  Greek  or  German.  The  French  and 
Italian  which  I  picked  up  later  I  can  read  more 
easily  than  the  German  upon  which  I  spent 
three  school  years.  Imagined  geographical 
wanderings,  the  disentangling  of  some  verses 
of  Vergil,  certain  neat  algebraic  solutions,  are  : 
all  of  my  ^^ learning"  that  excited  my  interest 
or  enthusiasm.  Nine  years  seems  an  uncon- 
scionable time  to  spend  learning  these  simple 
things. 

I  conclude  that  there  is  not  much  use  teaching 
children  things  that  they  will  not  assimilate 
with  their  own  curiosity,  and  connect  with  what 
they  consider  worth  while  in  their  world.  In 
my  own  case  this  curiosity  rarely  worked  in 
school.    I    cannot    defend    its    algebraic    and 


34  EDUCATION  AND  LIVINO 

Vergilian  workings  except  as  springing  from 
some  embryo  aesthetic  sense.  But  the  geo- 
graphical enthusiasm  is  perfectly  intelligible. 
It  is  connected  with  that  intellectual  education 
which  I  was  pursuing  parallel  to  my  school 
work,  and  which  merged  with  it  only  occasion- 
ally. This  unofficial  education,  begun  at  a  very 
early  age,  came  through  the  medium  of  the 
newspaper.  The  ^'New  York  Tribune,"  lying 
freshly  on  our  doorstep  every  morning,  was 
gathered  in  like  intellectual  manna  by  my  small 
and  grateful  self.  It  told  me  daily  of  a  wide, 
fascinating  and  important  world,  and  to  it  I 
reacted  with  never  failing  curiosity.  On  the 
political  events,  personalities,  foreign  wars, 
riots,  strikes,  plays,  books,  and  music  that 
streamed  disorganizedly  through  its  columns, 
no  school  subject  threw  any  light  except 
geography,  which  at  least  enabled  me  to  place 
things  on  the  map.  History,  which  might  have 
helped,  was  taught,  not  backwards,  in  the  order 
that  one's  curiosity  naturally  approaches  it, 
but  forwards,  so  that  at  no  time  did  we  get 
within  hailing  distance  of  the  present. 

My  real  education,  as  I  look  back  on  it,  con- 
sisted in  making  some  sort  of  order  out  of 
this  journalistic  chaos.    I  got  some  help  in  the 


LEAENING  OUT  OF  SCHOOL         35 

debates  on  current  events  which  a  radical  su- 
perintendent introduced  into  our  high  school. 
I  remember  pulverizing,  at  the  age  of  thirteen, 
my  opponents  in  debate,  with  proofs  that  a 
ruthless  dictatorship  was  the  only  form  of 
government  possible  in  the  primitive  state  of 
Santo  Domingo.  Our  household,  however,  w^s 
innocent  of  current  discussion.  The  public 
library  had  not  been  born.  I  had  to  plot  out 
this  larger  world  by  myself.  Indeed,  the 
grown-up  people  whom  I  sought  seemed  on  the 
whole  less  familiar  than  I  with  the  bearings 
of  my  curiosity.  I  cannot  say  that  there  was 
anything  subtle  or  complicated  or  critical  in 
my  acceptance  of  the  newspaper.  It  was  all  I 
could  do  to  get  the  world  mapped  out,  and  be- 
come familiar  with  the  names  that  I  read.  I 
remember  following  the  Greco-Turkish  War 
with  a  great  deal  of  satisfaction,  though  the 
issues  involved  and  the  real  military  operations 
never  meant  anything  at  all.  I  got  only  the 
pleasant  familiarity  with  this  wider  social 
world  that  one  would  get  in  meeting  the  same 
faces  constantly  in  the  street,  without  knowing 
the  names  of  the  people  or  speaking  to  them. 

Whatever    familiarity    with    the    trend    of 
events   and  the  wider   interests   of  men  and 


36  EDUCATION  AND  LXVING 

women  I  had  when  I  left  school  was  obtained 
in  this  way.  The  school  had  been  practically 
valueless  in  giving  me  the  background  of  the 
intellectual  world  in  which  I  was  henceforth  to 
live.  My  framework  was  bony  enough  and  the 
content  flimsy,  but  the  outlines  of  my  interests 
were  there,  and  curiosity  enough  to  keep  me 
ceaselessly  at  filling  in  that  content.  Nothing 
has  occurred  since  that  time  to  show  me, 
through  various  vicissitudes,  that  it  was  not 
the  most  useful  I  could  have.  That  its  founda- 
tions had  to  be  laid  outside  the  school  seems  to 
me  a  sheer  waste  of  educational  energy  on  the 
school's  part. 

Boldly  then,  and  in  true  egocentric  fashion, 
I  say  that  the  child  when  he  leaves  school  ought 
to  have  the  foundations  of  interest  in  the  events 
and  issues  in  which  people  generally  are  inter- 
ested. These  practically  all  come  within  the 
attention  of  the  metropolitan  newspaper.  The 
child  should  be  equipped  to  get  some  kind  of 
intelligent  reaction  to  what  he  reads  there 
about  political  and  sociological  events  and 
issues,  personalities,  art  and  literature.  No 
one  could  accuse  a  curriculum  based  on  the 
newspaper  of  being  aristocratic,  esoteric,  or 
ultra-cultural.    The  newspaper  is  the  one  com- 


LEARNING  OUT  OF  SCHOOL        37    - 

mon  intellectual  food  of  all  classes  and  types 
in  the  community.  Many  persons,  it  is  true, 
may  react  only  to  certain  specialized  depart- 
ments, and  yet  even  into  the  most  rudimentary 
journals  filter  most  of  these  larger  issues  and 
events.  To  use  this  stock  as  clues  and  work; 
out  the  historical,  geographical,  and  cultural 
ramifications  in  the  school  curriculum  would 
provide  this  broad  familiarity  with  the  world 
the  child  is  to  live  in  which  I  suggest.  I  would 
not  make  the  horrifying  proposal  that  the  news- 
paper be  used  as  a  school  text-book.  I  am  too 
well  aware  of  that  cardinal  tenet  of  current 
educational  morality  which  banishes  the  news- 
paper entirely  from  the  school.  There  is  some- 
thing rather  symbolic  about  that  tenet,  by  the 
way.  But  to  use  a  sort  of  generalized  news- 
paper as  the  nucleus  and  basis  of  a  curriculum 
would  be  a  different  matter.  It  would  be  using 
the  actual  current  life  of  society  as  the  guiding 
thread  of  what  the  child  is  to  know.  As  far 
as  the  purely  intellectual  content  of  the  school 
is  concerned,  it  would  do  what  so  many  edu- 
cators desire,  connect  the  school  with  life. 

This  ideal  may  be  incredible,  but  it  is  not 
necessarily  impossible.  Take  the  child  at  its 
lowest  terms,  as  a  troublesome  little  person 


38  EDUCATION  AND  LIVINa 

whom  its  parents  send  to  school  to  get  it  out 
of  the  way  of  the  crowded  home  until  it  is  old 
enough  to  go  to  work.  Then  take  the  present 
curriculum,  a  medley  of  equally  emphasized 
cultural,  scientific  and  manual  studies.  Now 
the  child  certainly  should  have  a  command  of 
the  three  E's  before  he  is  ten  years  old.  Sup- 
pose then  we  transfer  the  mathematical  and 
scientific  studies  to  a  place  subsidiary  to  the 
vocational  and  manual  work  that  is  being  so 
rapidly  developed.  They  would  be  taken  up, 
that  is,  only  as  the  theoretical  basis  for  this 
practical  work.  This  would  leave  four  or  five 
years  for  the  study  of  the  history,  geography, 
literature,  language,  and  civics,  before  the  mini- 
mum age  at  which  the  child  in  the  more  ad- 
vanced states  is  allowed  to  leave  school.  There 
seems  to  be  no  inherent  reason  why  a  great 
deal  could  not  be  done  in  that  time  to  prepare 
this  imaginative  background  for  the  world  we 
live  in. 

If  ^^cultivating  the  imagination"  means  any- 
thing it  means  ensuring  that  what  one  experi- 
ences in  daily  life  will  call  up  interesting  and 
significant  images  and  ideas.  The  public  school 
sometimes  attempts  to  cultivate  a  sort  of 
literary  and  mythological  imagination,  but  as 


LEARNING  OUT  OF  SCHOOL        39 

for  ensuring  that  those  references  to  places, 
persons,  books,  political  institutions,  ideas, 
which  occur  in  the  papers  and  weekly  journals, 
shall  call  up  to  the  mind  prompt,  accurate,  and 
stimulating  images  and  meanings,  it  has  been 
a  dead  failure.  An  exploration  of  the  current 
imagination  of  the  average  person  would  be  a 
curious  and  profitable  enterprise  for  a  psychol- 
ogist to  undertake.  For  the  cultivation  of  this 
imagery,  we  are  all  left,  as  the  child  is  left, 
to  the  chance  provision  of  the  contemporary 
news-provider,  the  illustrated  paper  and  ^^  Sun- 
day magazine."  Here  is  where  we  get  our 
notions  of  things  as  they  look  and  act. 

Beyond  all  else  the  child  should  leave  school 
with  a  wide  and  reliable  imagination — not  with 
facts  or  theories  so  much  as  pictures,  sympa- 
thies, apprehensions,  what  we  call  '^the  feeling 
for  the  thing."  Thus  equipped,  his  curiosity 
will  provide  him  with  all  the  facts  and  theories 
he  needs.  The  custom  of  teaching  by  subjects 
is  as  artificial  and  absurd  as  could  be  imagined. 
We  do  not  think  in  terms  of  history  or  geog- 
raphy or  language.  If  I  read  a  foreign  news- 
paper, all  these  are  merged  into  one  imagina- 
tive impression.  We  think  in  terms  of  situa- 
tions, which  have  settings  in  time  and  place,  and 


40  EDUCATION  AND  LIVINa 

all  sorts  of  fringes  and  implications.  Unless 
the  child  is  taught  in  this  spirit,  the  isolated 
subjects  will  have  no  meaning.  Without  the 
imaginative  background  that  fuses  and  vitalizes 
his  studies,  he  will  go  out  from  school  untaught 
and  unknowing. 


VI 

IN   A   SCHOOLKOOM 

THE  other  day  I  amused  myself  by  slipping 
into  a  recitation  at  the  suburban  high 
school  where  I  had  once  studied  as  a  boy.  The 
teacher  let  me  sit,  like  one  of  the  pupils,  at  an 
empty  desk  in  the  back  of  the  room,  and  for  an 
hour  I  had  before  my  eyes  the  interesting 
drama  of  the  American  school  as  it  unfolds  it- 
self day  after  day  in  how  many  thousands  of 
classrooms  throughout  the  land.  I  had  gone 
primarily  to  study  the  teacher,  but  I  soon  found 
that  the  pupils,  after  they  had  forgotten  my 
presence,  demanded  most  of  my  attention. 

Their  attitude  towards  the  teacher,  a  young 
man  just  out  of  college  and  amazingly  conscien- 
tious and  persevering,  was  that  good-humored 
tolerance  which  has  to  take  the  place  of  enthusi- 
astic interest  in  many  of  our  American  schools. 
They  seemed  to  like  the  teacher  and  recognize 
fully  his  good  intentions,  but  their  attitude  was 
a  delightful  one  of  all  making  the  best  of  a  bad 

41 


42  EDUCATION  AND  LIVINa 

bargain,  and  cooperating  loyally  with  him  in 
slowly  putting  the  hour  out  of  its  agony.  This 
good-natured  acceptance  of  the  inevitable,  this 
perfunctory  going  through  by  its  devotees  of  the 
ritual  of  education,  was  my  first  striking  im- 
pression, and  the  key  to  the  reflections  that  I 
began  to  weave. 

As  I  sank  down  to  my  seat  I  felt  all  that 
queer  sense  of  depression,  still  familiar  after 
ten  years,  that  sensation,  in  coming  into  the 
schoolroom,  of  suddenly  passing  into  a  helpless, 
impersonal  world,  where  expression  could  be 
achieved  and  curiosity  asserted  only  in  the  most 
formal  and  difficult  way.  And  the  class  began 
immediately  to  divide  itself  for  me,  as  I  looked 
around  it,  into  the  artificially  depressed  like 
myself,  commonly  called  the  ^^good"  children, 
and  the  artificially  stimulated,  commonly  known 
as  the  **bad,''  and  the  envy  and  despair  of 
every  '^good'^  child.  For  to  these  ^^bad''  chil- 
dren, who  are,  of  course,  simply  those  with 
more  self-assertion  and  initiative  than  the  rest, 
all  the  careful  network  of  discipline  and  order 
is  simply  a  direct  and  irresistible  challenge.  I 
remembered  the  fearful  awe  with  which  I  used 
to  watch  the  exhaustless  ingenuity  of  the  *^bad" 
boys  of  my  class  to  disrupt  the  peacefully  drag- 


IN  A  SCHOOLROOM  43 

ging  recitation;  and  behold,  I  found  myself 
watching  intently,  along  with  all  the  children  in 
my  immediate  neighborhood,  the  patient  activ- 
ity of  a  boy  who  spent  his  entire  hour  in  so 
completely  sharpening  a  lead-pencil  that  there 
was  nothing  left  at  the  end  but  the  lead.  Now 
what  normal  boy  would  do  so  silly  a  thing  or 
who  would  look  at  him  in  real  life?  But  here, 
in  this  artificial  atmosphere,  his  action  had  a 
sort  of  symbolic  quality;  it  was  assertion 
against  a  stupid  authority,  a  sort  of  blind  re- 
sistance against  the  attempt  of  the  schoolroom 
to  impersonalize  him.  The  most  trivial  inci- 
dent assumed  importance;  the  chiming  of  the 
town-clock,  the  passing  automobile,  a  slip  of  the 
tongue,  a  passing  footstep  in  the  hall,  would 
polarize  the  wandering  attention  of  the  entire 
class  like  an  electric  shock.  Indeed,  a  large 
part  of  the  teacher's  business  seemed  to  be  to 
demagnetize,  by  some  little  ingenious  touch,  his 
little  flock  into  their  original  inert  and  static 
elements. 

For  the  whole  machinery  of  the  classroom 
was  dependent  evidently  upon  this  segregation. 
Here  were  these  thirty  children,  all  more  or  less 
acquainted,  and  so  congenial  and  sympathetic 
that  the  slightest  touch  threw  them  all  together 


44  EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

into  a  solid  mass  of  attention  and  feeling.  Yet 
they  were  forced,  in  accordance  with  some  prin- 
ciple of  order,  to  sit  at  these  stiff  little  desks, 
equidistantly  apart,  and  prevented  under  pen- 
alty from  communicating  with  each  other.  All 
the  lines  between  them  were  supposed  to  be 
broken.  Each  existed  for  the  teacher  alone. 
In  this  incorrigibly  social  atmosphere,  with  all 
the  personal  influences  playing  around,  they 
were  supposed  to  be,  not  a  network  or  a  group, 
but  a  collection  of  things,  in  relation  only  with 
the  teacher. 

These  children  were  spending  the  sunniest 
hours  of  their  whole  lives,  five  days  a  week,  in 
preparing  themselves,  I  assume  by  the  acquisi- 
tion of  knowledge,  to  take  their  places  in  a  mod- 
ern world  of  industry,  ideas  and  business. 
What  institution,  I  asked  myself,  in  this  grown- 
up world  bore  resemblance  to  this  so  carefully 
segregated  classroom?  I  smiled,  indeed,  when 
it  occurred  to  me  that  the  only  possible  thing 
I  could  think  of  was  a  State  Legislature.  Was 
not  the  teacher  a  sort  of  Speaker  putting 
through  the  business  of  the  session,  enforcing 
a  sublimated  parliamentary  order,  forcing  his 
members  to  address  only  the  chair  and  avoid 
any  but   a   formal   recognition   of   their   col- 


IN  A  SCHOOLKOOM  45 

leagues?  How  amused,  I  thought,  would  Soc- 
rates have  been  to  come  upon  these  thousands 
of  little  training-schools  for  incipient  legisla- 
tors! He  might  have  recognized  what  admir- 
ably experienced  and  docile  Congressmen  such 
a  discipline  as  this  would  make,  if  there  were 
the  least  chance  of  any  of  these  pupils  ever 
reaching  the  House,  but  he  might  have  won- 
dered what  earthly  connection  it  had  with  the 
atmosphere  and  business  of  workshop  and  fac- 
tory and  office  and  store  and  home  into  which 
all  these  children  would  so  obviously  be  going. 
He  might  almost  have  convinced  himself  that 
the  business  of  adult  American  life  was  actually 
run  according  to  the  rules  of  parliamentary  or- 
der, instead  of  on  the  plane  of  personal  inter- 
course, of  quick  interchange  of  ideas,  the  un- 
derstanding and  the  grasping  of  concrete  social 
situations. 

It  is  the  merest  platitude,  of  course,  that 
those  people  succeed  who  can  best  manipulate 
personal  intercourse,  who  can  best  express 
themselves,  whose  minds  are  most  flexible  and 
most  responsive  to  others,  and  that  those  people 
would  deserve  to  succeed  in  any  form  of  society. 
But  has  there  ever  been  devised  a  more  ingen- 
ious enemy  of  personal  intercourse  than  the 


46  EDUCATION  AND  LIVINa 

modem  classroom,  catching,  as  it  does,  the  child 
in  his  most  impressionable  years?  The  two 
great  enemies  of  intercourse  are  bumptiousness 
and  diffidence,  and  the  classroom  is  perhaps  the 
most  successful  instrument  yet  devised  for  cul- 
tivating both  of  them. 

As  I  sat  and  watched  these  interesting  chil- 
dren struggling  with  these  enemies,  I  reflected 
that  even  with  the  best  of  people,  thinking  can- 
not be  done  without  talking.  For  thinking  is 
primarily  a  social  faculty ;  it  requires  the  stimu- 
lus of  other  minds  to  excite  curiosity,  to  arouse 
some  emotion.  Even  private  thinking  is  only 
a  conversation  with  one's  self.  Yet  in  the 
classroom  the  child  is  evidently  expected  to 
think  without  being  able  to  talk.  In  such  a 
rigid  and  silent  atmosphere,  how  could  any 
thinking  he  done,  where  there  is  no  stimulus,  no 
personal  expression? 

While  these  reflections  were  running  through 
my  head,  the  hour  dragged  to  its  close.  As 
the  bell  rang  for  dismissal,  a  sort  of  thrill  of 
rejuvenation  ran  through  the  building.  The 
**good"  children  straightened  up,  threw  off 
their  depression  and  took  back  their  self- 
respect,  the  ^^bad"  sobered  up,  threw  off  their 
swollen  egotism,  and  prepared  to  leave  behind 


IN  A  SCHOOLROOM    .  47 

them  their  mischievousness  in  the  room  that 
had  created  it.  Everything  suddenly  became 
human  again.  The  brakes  were  off,  and  life, 
with  all  its  fascinations  of  intrigue  and  amuse- 
ment, was  flowing  once  more.  The  school 
streamed  away  in  personal  and  intensely  inter- 
ested little  groups.  The  real  world  of  business 
and  stimulations  and  rebounds  was  thick  again 
here. 

If  I  had  been  a  teacher  and  watched  my  chil- 
dren going  away,  arms  around  each  other,  all 
aglow  with  talk,  I  should  have  been  very  wistful 
for  the  injection  of  a  little  of  that  animation 
into  the  dull  and  halting  lessons  of  the  class- 
room. Was  I  a  horrible  ^intellectual,"  to  feel 
sorry  that  all  this  animation  and  verve  of  life 
should  be  perpetually  poured  out  upon  the 
ephemeral,  while  thinking  is  made  as  difficult  as 
possible,  and  the  expressive  and  intellectual 
child  made  to  seem  a  sort  of  monstrous  pariah? 

Now  I  know  all  about  the  logic  of  the  class- 
room, the  economies  of  time,  money,  and  man- 
agement that  have  to  be  met.  I  recognize  that 
in  the  cities  the  masses  that  come  to  the  schools 
require  some  sort  of  rigid  machinery  for  their 
governance.  Hand-educated  children  have  had 
to  go  the  way  of  hand-made  buttons.    Children 


48  EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

have  had  to  be  massed  together  into  a  school- 
room just  as  cotton  looms  have  had  to  be 
massed  together  into  a  factory.  The  difficulty 
is  that,  unlike  cottom  looms,  massed  children 
make  a  social  group,  and  that  the  mind  and  per- 
sonality can  only  be  developed  by  the  freely 
inter-stimulating  play  of  minds  in  a  group.  Is 
it  not  very  curious  that  we  spend  so  much  time 
on  the  practice  and  methods  of  teaching,  and 
never  criticize  the  very  framework  itself?  Call 
this  thing  that  goes  on  in  the  modern  school- 
room schooling,  if  you  like.  Only  don't  call  it 
education. 


VII 

THE  CULT   OF   THE   BEST 

A  VALUABLE  inventory  of  onr  American 
ideals  of  taste  and  culture  should  result 
from  the  request  of  the  American  Federation  of 
Arts  that  the  Carnegie  Foundation  undertake 
an  investigation  of  the  teaching  of  art  in  this 
country.  "We  have  devoted  much  attention  to 
importing  aesthetic  values  and  works  of  art 
from  Europe,  and  to  providing  museums,  libra- 
ries and  art  courses  for  the  public.  But  we 
have  scarcely  asked  ourselves  what  is  to  come 
of  it  all.  A  survey  of  what  is  being  done  ^'in 
the  schools  and  colleges  and  universities  as  well 
as  in  the  professional  art  schools  of  the  country 
to  promote  the  knowledge,  appreciation  and 
production  of  art  in  America"  will  be  of  little 
value,  however,  if  it  is  to  concern  itself  merely 
with  discovering  how  many  art  schools  and  how 
many  students  there  are ;  how  many  courses  on 
art  are  given  in  the  colleges,  and  the  credits 
which  each  course  counts  towards  the  degree. 

49 


50  EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

What  we  need  to  know  is  the  direction  of  the 
studies.  We  must  not  feel  relieved  in  spirit  if 
we  find  there  is  *^ enough,"  and  correspondingly- 
depressed  if  we  find  there  is  ^'not  enough"  be- 
ing done  for  art  in  America.  We  must  clear  up 
our  ideas  as  to  what  a  genuine  art  education 
would  be  for  the  layman,  and  then  ask  whether 
the  present  emphases  are  the  ones  to  produce  it. 
Artistic  appreciation  in  this  country  has  been 
understood  chiefly  as  the  acquiring  of  a  famil- 
iarity with  ^'good  works  of  art,"  and  with  the 
historical  fields  of  the  different  arts,  rather 
than  as  the  cultivating  of  spontaneous  taste. 
The  millionaire  with  his  magnificent  collections 
has  only  been  doing  objectively  what  the  anx- 
ious college  student  is  doing  who  takes  courses 
in  the  history  and  appreciation  of  art,  music  or 
literature,  or  the  women's  clubs  that  follow 
standard  manuals  of  criticism  and  patronize 
bureaus  of  university  travel.  Everywhere  the 
emphasis  is  on  acquisition.  A  great  machinery 
for  the  extension  of  culture  has  grown  up 
around  us  in  the  last  generation,  devoted  to  the 
collection,  objectively  or  imaginatively,  of  mas- 
terpieces. The  zealous  friends  of  art  in  and  out 
of  the  schools  have  been  engaged  in  bringing 
before  an  ever-widening  public  a  roster  of  the 


THE  CULT  OF  THE  BEST  51 

'^best."  Art  education  has  been  almost  en- 
tirely a  learning  about  what  is  ^^good."  ^'Cul- 
ture" has  come  to  mean  the  jacking-up  of  one's 
appreciations  a  notch  at  a  time  until  they  have 
reached  a  certain  standard  level.  To  be  cul- 
tured has  meant  to  like  masterpieces. 

Art  education  has,  in  other  words,  become  al- 
most a  branch  of  moral  education.  We  are 
scarcely  out  of  that  period  when  it  was  a  moral 
obligation  upon  every  child  to  learn  to  play  the 
piano.  There  is  still  a  thoughtful  striving 
after  righteousness  in  our  attendance  at  the 
opera.  And  this  moral  obligation  is  supported 
by  quasi-ecclesiastical  sanctions.  Each  art,  as 
taught  in  our  schools  and  colleges,  has  its  truly 
formidable  canon  of  the  ^^best,"  and  its  insist- 
ent discrimination  between  the  sanctified  and 
the  apocryphal  scriptures.  The  teaching  of 
English  literature  in  the  colleges  is  a  pure  ex- 
ample of  this  orthodoxy.  Criticism  and  ex- 
pression are  neglected  in  favor  of  absorption 
and  reverence  of  the  classics.  The  student  en- 
ters college  on  a  ritual  of  examination  in  them. 
He  remains  only  through  his  susceptibility  to 
their  influence.  Examine  what  passes  for  cul- 
tural education  in  other  fields,  and  you  will  find 
that  it  is  historical,  lexicographical,  encyclopae- 


52  EDUCATION  AND  LIVINa 

die,  and  neither  utilitarian  nor  aesthetic.  It  is 
prompted  by  the  scholarly  ideal  rather  than  by 
an  ideal  of  taste.  The  prize  goes  to  those  who 
can  acquire  the  most  of  these  goods.  No  one  is 
challenged  to  spontaneous  taste  any  more  than 
the  monk  is  asked  to  create  his  own  dogmas. 

To  me  this  conception  of  culture  is  unpleas- 
antly undemocratic.  I  am  not  denying  the  su- 
perlative beauty  of  what  has  come  to  be  of- 
ficially labeled  ^Hhe  best  that  has  been  thought 
and  done  in  the  world."  But  I  do  object  to  its 
being  made  the  universal  norm.  For  if  you 
educate  people  in  this  way,  you  only  really  edu- 
cate those  whose  tastes  run  to  the  classics. 
You  leave  the  rest  of  the  world  floundering  in  a 
fog  of  cant,  largely  unconscious  perhaps,  try- 
ing sincerely  to  squeeze  their  appreciations 
through  the  needle's  eye.  You  get  as  a  result 
hypocrites  or  *  lowbrows,"  with  culture  re- 
served only  for  a  few.  All  the  rest  of  us  are 
left  without  guides,  without  encouragement, 
and  tainted  with  original  sin. 

An  education  in  art  appreciation  will  be 
valueless  if  it  does  not  devote  itself  to  clarify- 
ing and  integrating  natural  taste.  The  empha- 
sis must  be  always  on  what  you  do  like,  not  on 
what  you  ought  to  like.    We  have  never  had  a 


THE  CULT  OF  THE  BEST  53 

real  test  of  whether  bad  taste  is  positive  or 
merely  a  lack  of  consciousness.  We  have  never 
tried  to  discover  strong  spontaneous  lines  of 
diversified  taste.  To  the  tyranny  of  the '  ^besf 
which  Arnold's  persuasive  power  imposed  upon 
this  most  inquisitive,  eager  and  rich  American 
generation,  can  be  laid,  I  think,  our  failure  to 
develop  the  distinctive  styles  and  indigenous 
art  spirit  which  the  soil  should  have  brought 
forth  abundantly.  For  as  long  as  you  humbly 
follow  the  best,  you  have  no  eyes  for  the  vital. 
If  you  are  using  your  energy  to  cajole  your  ap- 
preciations, you  have  none  left  for  unforced 
aesthetic  emotion.  If  your  training  has  been  to 
learn  and  appreciate  the  best  that  has  been 
thought  and  done  in  the  world,  it  has  not 
been  to  discriminate  between  the  significant  and 
the  irrelevant  that  the  experience  of  every  day 
is  flinging  up  in  your  face.  Civilized  life  is 
really  one  aesthetic  challenge  after  another,  and 
no  training  in  appreciation  of  art  is  worth  any- 
thing unless  one  has  become  able  to  react  to 
forms  and  settings.  The  mere  callousness  with 
which  we  confront  our  ragbag  city  streets  is  evi-* 
dence  enough  of  the  futility  of  the  Arnold  ideal. 
To  have  learned  to  appreciate  a  Mantegna  and 
a  Japanese  print,  and  Dante  and  Debussy,  and 


54  EDUCATION  AND  LIVINa 

not  to  have  learned  nausea  at  Main  street, 
means  an  art  education  which  is  not  merely 
worthless  but  destructive. 

I  know  that  such  complaints  are  met  by  the 
plea  that  the  fight  has  been  so  hard  in  this 
country  to  get  any  art  education  at  all  that  it 
is  idle  to  talk  of  cultivating  public  taste  until 
this  battle  is  won.  Mr.  Edward  Dickinson 
still  pleads  in  a  recent  book  the  cause  of  music 
to  the  stony  educationists  of  the  land.  Let  us 
get  a  foothold  in  the  colleges  with  our  music 
courses,  these  defenders  seem  to  say,  and  your 
taste  will  evolve  from  them.  But  the  way  to 
reach  a  goal  is  not  to  start  off  in  the  opposite  di- 
rection, and  my  thesis  is  that  education  in  the  ap- 
preciation of  art  has  been  moving  exactly  in  this 
wrong  direction.  Widespread  artistic  taste 
would  have  had  a  better  chance  to  develop  in 
this  country  if  we  had  not  been  so  much  con- 
cerned with  knowing  what  we  ought  to  know  and 
liking  what  we  ought  to  like.  The  movement 
has  caught  those  whose  taste  happened  to  co- 
incide with  the  canons.  It  has  perverted  a 
much  larger  host  who  have  tried  to  pretend  that 
their  taste  coincided.  And  it  has  left  untouched 
the  joyous  masses  who  might  easily,  as  in  other 


THE  CULT  OF  THE  BEST  55 

countries,  have  evolved  a  folk-culture  if  they 
had  not  been  outlawed  by  this  ideal. 

The  ideal  still  dominates,  although  it  becomes 
every  day  more  evident  that  its  effect  has  been 
disastrous.  A  younger  generation  of  archi- 
tects has  filled  our  cities  with  sepulchral  neo- 
classicism  and  imitative  debris  of  all  the  ages. 
We  get  its  apotheosis  in  the  fantasy  of  Wash- 
ington, where  French  chateaux  snuggle  up  close 
to  colonial  mansions,  and  the  great  lines  of  the 
city  are  slashed  by  cheap  and  tawdry  blocks. 
All  this  has  been  done  with  the  best  will  in  the 
world,  by  men  curious  and  skilful,  well  in- 
structed in  the  *^best"  of  all  time.  It  has  been 
a  conscientious  following  of  an  ideal  of  beauty. 
We  are  just  beginning  to  discover  uneasily  how 
false  that  ideal  is.  Art  to  most  of  us  has  come 
to  mean  painting  instead  of  the  decoration  and 
design  and  social  setting  that  would  make  sig- 
nificant our  objective  life.  Our  moral  sense 
has  made  us  mad  for  artistic  ^ brightness." 
What  we  have  got  out  of  it  is  something  much 
worse  than  imitation.    It  is  worship. 

This  effort  to  follow  the  best,  which  even  our 
revolutionists  engage  in,  has  the  effect  of  either 
closing  the  appreciation  to  new  styles  or  leav-  j 


56  EDUCATION  AND  LIVINa 

ing  it  open  to  passing  winds  of  fashion.  That 
we  are  fashion-ridden  is  the  direct  result  of  an 
education  which  has  made  acquisition  and  not 
discrimination  the  motive.  The  cult  of  the  best 
is  harmless  only  if  it  has  been  superimposed  on 
the  broadest  basis  of  personal  discrimination, 
begun  in  earliest  years.  Let  us  admit  that  the 
appreciations  of  the  Brahmins  marvelously  co- 
incide with  what  Matthew  Arnold  has  stamped 
as  right.  But  perhaps  for  most  of  us  there  has 
not  been  the  environment  to  produce  that  happy 
coincidence.  Our  education  has  forced  us  all 
to  be  self-made  men  in  artistic  appreciation. 
Our  tastes  suffer  from  hiatuses  and  crotchi- 
nesses  and  color-blindnesses  because  no  effort 
has  been  made  to  integrate  our  sincere  likes  and 
dislikes  and  focus  and  sharpen  our  reactions. 
Until  the  present  ideal  is  overthrown,  we  have 
no  chance  of  getting  a  sincere  and  general  pub- 
lic taste.  We  can  have  only  the  mechanics  of 
art  education.  I  do  not  mean  that  America  has 
been  unique  in  this.  We  have  only  been  a  little 
worse  than  other  countries  because  we  have 
been  more  conscientious. 


VIII 

EDUCATION   IN   TASTE 

THEEE  is  a  naively  systematic  way  of  teach- 
ing artistic  appreciation  to  the  students  of 
many  of  our  city  schools.  To  each  class  is  al- 
lotted a  famous  painter.  The  class  is  then 
taken  en  masse  to  the  art  museum,  and,  under 
the  guidance  of  one  of  the  official  show- women, 
confronted  with  the  masterpieces  of  its  pro- 
prietary genius.  The  children  hear  the  dates 
of  the  painter's  life,  details  of  his  career,  the 
significance  of  his  pictures,  the  particular  beau- 
ties of  his  styles,  and  any  other  loose  fragments 
of  knowledge  that  may  appeal  to  their  guide. 
After  they  have  been  exposed  long  enough  to 
the  pictures  to  give  confidence  that  appreciation 
has  taken  place  in  them,  they  are  allowed  to 
exchange  painters  with  another  class,  and  in 
rigid  platoon  proceed  to  appreciate  their  new 
idol  in  the  same  way.  Presumably  their  appre- 
ciation finally  flows  over  the  entire  museum, 
and  they  take  their  places  among  the  cultivated 
of  the  land. 

67 


58  EDUCATION  AND  LIVINa 

The  other  day  in  a  New  Jersey  school  I  was 
shown  some  wall-paper  designs  that  had  just 
been  made  in  a  class  of  the  youngest  children. 
A  simple  figure  had  been  given  them  with  which 
to  cover  a  sheet  of  paper  in  any  pattern  they 
chose.  The  thirty  papers  presented  the  most 
astonishing  variety.  They  ranged  from  mere 
blotches  to  orderly  and  regular  patterns.  Some 
children  had  merely  reproduced  the  figure  in 
parallel  lines  across  the  paper.  Others  had  al- 
ternated their  lines  and  made  a  more  pleasing 
scheme.  Here  was  a  living  demonstration  of 
the  variety  of  artistic  skill,  but  I  was  more  in- 
terested in  the  appreciation.  The  teacher  told 
me  that  she  had  pinned  all  the  designs  on  the 
wall,  and  without  any  suggestion  to  the  children 
had  asked  them  to  choose  which  they  liked  best. 
There  had  been  a  large  consensus  of  liking  for 
the  alternate  lines,  the  pattern  which  was  obvi- 
ously the  most  regular  and  the  most  pleasing. 

In  that  museum  system  of  class-painters  who 
were  to  be  duly  *^ appreciated"  I  had  a  perfect 
example  of  the  old  unregenerate  cult  of  the 
best.  But  my  New  Jersey  school  convinced  me 
that  these  vestal  virgins  of  the  museums  were 
guarding  a  decaying  fane.  The  young  teacher 
in  the  classroom  had  the  beginnings  of  what 


EDUCATION  IN  TASTE  59 

would  be  a  genuine  education  in  taste.  If  that 
same  critical  and  discriminating  spirit  could  be 
carried  forward  with  these  littlest  children  all 
through  their  schooling,  most  of  them  would  get 
a  robust  sense  of  values  that  would  be  spon- 
taneous, that  would  never  have  to  be  cajoled, 
and  that  could  not  be  threatened.  Might  not 
this  process  of  refining  taste  be  woven  into  our 
elementary  education?  Already  we  have  its 
embryo  in  these  kindergartens  and  lower  grades. 
It  is  a  question  of  emphasis,  of  making  the 
teachers  see  that  the  constant  challenge  to  taste 
is  one  of  the  most  important  functions  of  the 
school.  Types  of  school  such  as  the  Play-School 
make  expression  and  selection  the  basis  of  their 
life.  The  most  valuable  feature  of  the  Montes- 
sori  school  is  the  training  of  the  senses,  the 
quickening  of  response  to  sounds  and  colors  and 
forms.  Suppose  a  child  were  brought  up  from 
his  earliest  years  in  everyday  contact  with  forms 
and  colors,  without  its  ever  being  hinted  to  him 
that  some  were  ^^good"  and  others  '^bad." 
Suppose  the  child  were  urged  to  choose  and  to 
express  his  likes  and  dislikes,  not  giving  his 
reasons  but  merely  telling  as  he  could  what  he 
saw  or  heard.  Suppose  this  attempt  were  made 
through  the  course  of  his  school  life  to  clarify 


60  EDUCATION  AND  LIVINa 

his  appeals  and  repugnances,  not  by  rationaliz- 
ing them  but  by  synthesizing  them.  Would  not 
something  like  taste  evolve  out  of  it  all? 

Emphasis  on  what  the  pupil  likes  instead  of 
what  he  ought  to  like  would  change  the  tone 
of  school  or  college.  The  average  mediocre 
student  under  our  present  regime  gets  an  al- 
most uncanny  desire  to  do  things  *^ right.'' 
Since  success  in  school  depends  on  doing  what 
the  teacher  thinks  is  right,  education  becomes  on 
the  child's  part  a  technique  of  accurate  guess- 
ing. Anyone  who  has  spent  much  time  in  high 
schools  knows  how  eagerly  children  will  pounce 
on  any  official  judgment  concerning  a  book  or 
person  or  picture  or  idea.  The  study  of  Eng- 
lish classics  in  most  schools  becomes  a  festering 
bed  of  hypocrisy.  And  it  is  often  the  intrinsi- 
cally amenable  who  are  the  most  conscientious 
and  who  therefore  most  hopelessly  overlay  their 
own  reactions  with  other  people's  judgments. 
The  modern  school  recitation  has  degenerated 
into  a  skilful  guessing  on  the  part  of  the  child 
of  what  the  teacher  ^'wants''  him  to  say.  And 
this  is  a  symbol  of  the  general  attitude,  in 
school  and  out,  towards  cultural  things. 

A  laudable  attempt  has  been  made  in  the  col- 
leges to  teach  the  student  to  think,  but  I  wonder 


EDUCATION  IN  TASTE  61 

sometimes  whether  it  has  proceeded  very  fai?, 
beyond  encouraging  him  to  find  reasons  for 
ideas  and  attitudes  which  he  is  persuaded  he 
ought  to  have.  For  most  colkge  students  it  is 
already  too  late.  Expression  and  discrimina- 
tion are  the  last  things  which  the  primary  and 
secondary  schools  have  been  emphasizing.  The 
boy  and  girl  come  to  college  with  no  background 
of  taste  or  selection,  and  the  old  docility,  the 
old  unconscious  hypocrisy,  must  dog  them  all 
through  their  course.  I  would  make  a  larger, 
part  of  the  process  of  thinking  in  school  and 
college  the  discovery  of  what  one  likes  and 
wants,  the  control  and  direction  of  desire.  Al- 
most the  whole  object  of  education  should  be 
to  know  what  one  truly  and  wholeheartedly  likes 
and  wants. 

Yet  the  modem  school  is  just  the  place  where 
this  critical,  discriminating  attitude  has  a 
chance  of  being  cultivated.  The  secret  of  all 
the  current  tendencies  towards  the  ^^  school  of 
to-morrow '^  is  the  increasing  participation  of 
the  children  in  th^  work  of  their  own  school. 
The  Wirt  plan,  where  the  children  help  the  me- 
chanics decorate  the  rooms,  and  dramatize  their 
school-life  in  auditorium  exercises,  perhaps 
carries  this  cooperation  farthest,  but  in  number- 


62  EDUCATION  AND  LIVINa 

less  schools  that  have  shopwork,  gardens,  dra- 
matizations, etc.,  the  same  evolution  is  apparent. 
Now  every  touch  of  dramatic,  artistic  and 
literary  expression  made  by  the  children  in  the 
school  affords  material  for  education  in  taste. 
Expression  and  criticism  play  into  each  other's 
hands.  Any  expression  which  passes  without 
a  reaction  from  some  part  of  this  little  school 
public  is  expression  wasted.  If  the  child  does 
not  learn  in  the  school  to  observe  and  reflect 
upon  and  react  to  the  expressive  life  that  flows 
around  him  in  the  school,  he  will  never  react 
intelligently  to  anything  outside  the  school. 
His  childish  criticism  will  of  course  be  as  ele- 
mentary as  the  expression  is  elementary.  But 
the  emphasis  of  teachers  should  be  there. 
Taste  must  flow  naturally  and  spontaneously 
out  of  the  experiences  of  everyday  life. 

Such  an  effort  in  the  education  of  taste  has 
a  much  better  chance  of  success  than  has  our 
traditional  guidance.  To  impose  canons  on  a 
younger  generation,  to  make  students  appre- 
ciate the  best  in  the  arts,  we  need  hosts  of 
teachers  who  are  finely  tuned  to  these  appreci- 
ations themselves,  teachers  whose  tastes  natur- 
ally coincide  with  what  has  been  consecrated  by 
time,  and  who  can  communicate  their  admira- 


EDUCATION  IN  TASTE  63 

tions.  Experience  has  proved  that  we  shall 
never  have  those  hosts  of  teachers.  We  should 
never  have  enough  Matthew  Arnolds  to  go 
round.  What  art  education  suffers  from  in  this 
country  is  teachers  who  have  only  the  mechanics 
of  appreciation  without  the  inner  glow.  And  it 
is  futile  to  expect  that  we  shall  ever  have  enough 
with  the  classic  inner  glow.  In  this  new  direc- 
tion, however,  the  teacher  need  not  be  mentor, 
but  guide  and  provocative.  Never  being  called 
upon  to  impart  judgments  or  appreciations  to 
the  student,  what  he  requires  most  is  not  judg- 
ments and  appreciations  of  his  own  but  curiosity 
as  to  the  student's  reactions.  He  need  only  be^ 
saying  constantly  to  the  student,  what  do  you 
like  and  how  does  it  compare  with  something 
else  that  you  like?  He  need  provide  only  the 
paraphernalia  of  art,  the  materials  and  proc- 
esses, for  the  student  to  do  his  own  work.  If 
the  teacher  is  of  sound  original  taste,  he  can 
give  the  student  criticism  and  aid  him  in  his 
analysis  and  comparison.  If  he  is  not,  he  is  at 
least  prevented  from  making  the  student's  taste 
hypocritical. 

If  this  attitude  became  general  in  our 
aesthetic  education,  it  would  not  be  long  before 
results  became  noticeable.    We  should  get  a 


64  EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

variety  of  tastes — some  of  them  traditional, 
some  of  them  strange  and  new,  but  most  of  them 
at  least  spontaneous,  indigenous.  At  present 
we  have  no  way  of  knowing  whether  any  par- 
ticular manifestation  of  public  taste  is  conven- 
tional, fashion-induced,  imitative,  or  sincerely 
felt.  Much  spontaneous  taste  might  turn  out 
to  be  traditional.  The  majority  of  children 
trained  in  discrimination  might  prove  to  be  in- 
cipient Brahmins.  On  the  other  hand  we  might 
get  strange  and  vigorous  expressions  like  the 
contemporary  architecture  and  sculpture  of 
Germany.  I  am  assuming  that  taste  and  cre- 
ation will  fertilize  each  other.  For  this  fer- 
tilization we  must  have  a  liberation  of  taste 
from  the  sterile  control  of  the  ^^best.''  This 
does  not  mean  that  every  person  would  become 
endowed  with  original  taste,  but  that  we  should 
have  a  chance  to  find  original  taste  out.  We 
should  have  done  all  within  human  power  to 
create  public  taste,  as  our  present  ideal  does 
everything  to  prevent  it.  As  a  result  we  should 
have  a  chance  of  some  kind  of  integrated  cul- 
ture. In  each  art  we  might  find  several  very 
strongly  marked  directions  of  style  and  taste 
which  should  appeal  to  different  people.  It 
would  then  be  the  task  of  criticism  not  to  choose 


EDUCATION  IN  TASTE  65 

between  them  but  to  discover  their  sincerity  and 
significance.  Style  is  a  matter  of  right  rela- 
tions. Things  have  style  when  their  parts  make 
each  other  and  the  whole  significant.  Indigen- 
ous style  is  the  only  art  that  really  means  any- 
thing. Out  of  an  education  in  taste  will  grow 
creative  art  as  a  flower  from  rich  soil. 


IX 

UNIVERSAL   SERVICE   AND   EDUCATION 

THE  current  agitation  for  preparedness  has 
set  hosts  of  Americans  to  thinking  out  for 
the  first  time  what  a  real  national  strength  and 
readiness  would  mean.  We  suddenly  realize 
that  if  we  are  to  defeat  that  militaristic  trend 
which  we  loathe  we  shall  have  to  offer  some  kind 
of  action  more  stirring  and  more  creative.  The 
call  now  upon  every  citizen  is  to  be  not  nebu- 
lously patriotic,  but  clear  and  lucid  as  to  Amer- 
ica 's  aims,  so  that  our  natural  energy  shall  not 
be  squandered  and  misused.  There  looms  up  as 
a  crucial  need  that  ^^ moral  equivalent  for  war'' 
with  which  William  James  first  roused  our 
imaginations.  It  seems  no  longer  so  academic 
a  proposal.  Confronted  with  the  crisis,  we  see 
that  he  analyzed  the  situation  with  consummate 
accuracy. 

All  around  us  we  see  a  very  genuine  craving 
for  unity  of  sentiment,  for  service,  for  some  new 
national  lift  and  broadening  which  shall  keep 

66 


UNIVERSAL  SERVICE  67 

us  out  of  the  uneasy  pettiness  into  which  the 
American  conscience  has  threatened  to  fall.  In 
our  hearts  we  know  that  to  crystallize  this  de- 
sire into  a  meaningless  sentiment,  or  into  a 
piling-up  of  armaments  or  a  proscribing  of  alien 
cultures,  would  not  satisfy  us.  We  want  ac- 
tion, but  we  do  not  want  military  action.  Even 
the  wildest  patriots  know  that  America  would 
have  to  go  through  the  most  pernicious  and 
revolutionary  changes  to  accept  the  universal 
military  service  which  they  advocate.  We  wish 
to  advance  from  where  we  stand.  We  begin  to 
suspect  that  military  service,  flag-reverence, 
patriotic  swagger,  are  too  much  the  weary  old 
deep-dug  channels  into  which  national  feeling 
always  runs  and  is  lost.  The  flooding  river  fills 
again  its  archaic  and  forsaken  paths.  Our 
present  confusion  expresses  the  dilemma  we 
find  ourselves  in,  when  our  instincts  impel  us 
into  courses  that  our  intelligence  tells  us  we 
ought  not  to  follow. 

Our  American  danger  is  not  so  much  that  we 
become  militarists  as  that  we  grope  along,  fret- 
ting and  harrying  each  other  into  a  unity  which 
is  delusive,  and  expressing  our  ^^Americanism'' 
in  activities  that  are  not  creative.  The  best  will 
in  America  at  the  present  time  seems  to  crave 


68  EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

some  kind  of  national  service  but  it  veers  off 
from  military  service.  Until  we  satisfy  that 
craving,  we  shall  run  at  half -power,  and  suffer 
all  the  dissatisfaction  and  self-despising  that 
comes  from  repressed  energy.  The  question 
which  all  are  asking,  in  the  varied  and  disguised 
forms,  is:  How  can  we  all  together  serve 
America  by  really  enhancing  her  life  ? 

To  more  and  more  of  us  the  clue  has  come 
through  James's  conception  of  a  productive 
army  of  youth,  warring  against  nature  and  not 
against  men,  finding  in  drudgery  and  toil  and 
danger  the  values  that  war  and  preparation  for 
war  have  given.  Ten  years  ago  such  an  army 
seemed  Utopian.  We  had  neither  the  desire 
nor  the  technique.  It  seemed  a  project  not  to 
be  realized  without  a  reorganization  of  our  life 
so  radical  as  to  make  the  army  itself  unneces- 
sary. To-day,  however,  a  host  of  new  atti- 
tudes seem  to  give  us  the  raw  material  out  of 
which  such  a  national  service  could  be  created. 
We  hear  much  of  universal  military  service  as 
*^  education."  The  Plattsburgs  are  sugar- 
coated  as  ^* civic-training  camps,"  '* schools  for 
citizenship."  Universal  service  no  longer 
stands  on  its  old  ground  of  mere  preparation 
for  war.    It  is   frankly  trying  to   get  itself 


UNIVERSAL  SERVICE  69 

recognized  as  an  indispensable  mode  of  educa- 
tion. The  next  pertinent  step  is  evidently  to 
ask  why,  if  universal  service  is  valuable  be- 
cause it  is  educational,  it  should  not  be  con- 
structed on  a  strict  educational  foundation. 

James's  proposal  sounded  Utopian  because  it 
would  require  an  entirely  new  and  colossal  na- 
tional organization  to  put  it  into  action.  Uni- 
versal military  service  in  this  country  would 
certainly  mean  such  a  task.  But  if  our  national 
service  is  to  be  educational,  we  already  have  the 
organization  in  existence.  The  rapidly  consoli- 
dating public  school  systems  in  the  states  pro- 
vide the  machinery  for  such  an  organization. 
As  the  public  schools  becoihe  better  places  for 
children  to  spend  their  time  in,  we  are  growing 
less  tolerant  of  the  forms  of  schooling  outside 
of  the  public  system.  The  tendency  is  towards 
the  inclusion  of  all  children  in  the  public  school. 
And  the  progressive  states  are  requiring  school- 
ing up  to  the  full  age  of  sixteen  years.  We  are 
rapidly  creating  a  public  school  system,  effec- 
tively administered  by  the  states,  which  gives 
us  the  one  universally  national  compulsory 
service  which  we  possess  or  are  ever  likely  to 
consent  to. 

Education  is  the  only  form  of  ** conscription" 


70  EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

to  which  Americans  have  ever  given  consent. 
Compulsory  military  service  would  require  de- 
cades of  Napoleonic  political  evangelism  to  in- 
troduce. Compulsory  education  is  universally 
accepted.  For  a  national  service  which  shall 
be  educational  you  would  have  to  convert  no- 
body. The  field  is  sown.  No  one  denies  the 
right  of  the  state  to  conscript  the  child  for 
education.  But  coupled  with  this  assent  is  the 
insistence  that  the  education  shall  be  the  freest, 
fullest  and  most  stimulating  that  we  know  how 
to  give.  The  current  educational  interest  arises 
largely  from  the  indignant  demand  that  a  state 
which  takes  all  the  children  must  meet  the  needs 
of  every  child.  The  very  recent  enthusiasm  for 
^Vocational  education"  means  that  we  want  a 
schooling  that  shall  issue  in  capacity  for  fruit- 
ful occupation.  A  national  educational  service 
could  give  training  for  work  at  the  same  time 
that  it  gave  opportunity  for  service. 

It  is  only  a  national  service  of  this  kind  that 
would  really  be  universal.  Military  service  is 
a  sham  universality.  It  omits  the  feminine  half 
of  the  nation's  youth.  And  of  the  masculine 
half  it  uses  only  the  physically  best.  France 
is  the  only  country  where  the  actual  levy  on  men 
for  military  service  has  approximated  the  num- 


UNIVERSAL  SERVICE  71 

ber  liable.  But  worst  of  all,  military  service 
irons  out  all  differences  of  talent  and  ability.  It 
does  not  even  tap  the  resources  it  enlists.  It 
makes  out  of  an  infinitely  varied  group  a  mere 
machine  of  uniform,  obeying  units.  The  per- 
sonal qualities,  the  individual  powers  of  the 
youth  it  trains,  are  of  no  relevance  whatever. 
Men  are  valuable  exactly  to  the  degree  that  they 
crush  out  these  differences. 

A  national  service  for  education  would  not 
be  a  sham.  It  would  actually  enlist  the  co- 
operation of  every  youth  and  girl.  It  would 
aim  at  stimulation,  not  obedience.  It  would  call 
out  capacity  and  not  submerge  it.  It  would 
organize  varied  tasks  adapted  to  the  capacities 
and  strengths  of  its  young  citizenry.  It  would 
be  universal,  but  it  would  be  compulsory  only 
in  the  sense  that  it  called  every  one  to  the  serv- 
ice. The  tasks  would  not  be  enforced  drudgery, 
but  work  that  enlisted  the  will  and  toned  up  the 
aspirations. 

Such  a  national  service  would  be  the  logical 
outgrowth  of  our  public  school  system.  Sup- 
pose the  state  said:  All  children  shall  remain 
in  school  till  the  age  of  sixteen  years.  Between 
the  ages  of  sixteen  and  twenty-one  they  shall 
spend  two  years  in  national  service.    This  serv- 


72  EDUCATION  AND  LIVINa 

ice  shall  be  organized  and  administered  by  the 
state  educational  administrations,  but  super- 
vised and  subsidized  by  the  national  govern- 
ment. The  service  would  be  performed  as  na- 
tional service,  but  its  work  would  be  construc- 
tive and  communal  in  its  purposes  and  not 
military.  Special  military  training  could  be 
given  as  a  branch  of  this  service  to  those  who 
were  best  fitted  for  it.  But  defense  would  be 
but  an  incident  in  our  constructive  life,  and  not 
the  sinew  of  our  effort. 

The  tasks  for  such  a  national  service  would 
evidently  be  different  from  those  contemplated 
by  James.  He  thought  of  turning  his  army  of 
youth  into  the  drudgery  of  the  world,  where 
they  might  win  in  heroic  toil  and  self-sacrifice 
the  moral  rewards  which  war  had  formerly 
given.  But  if  our  service  is  to  be  universal,  it 
cannot  be  mere  unskilled  labor  in  mines  and 
farms  and  forests.  A  large  proportion  of  our 
youth  would  be  disqualified.  Furthermore,  a 
service  which  made  such  frontal  attack  on  in- 
dustry would  be  bitterly  resisted  by  those  with 
whom  its  work  competed.  We  are  not  pre- 
pared for  a  service  which  clashes  too  suddenly 
and  harshly  with  the  industrial  system.  What 
we  need  is  a  service  which  shall  not  so  much  do 


UNIVERSAL  SERVICE  73 

the  old  work  of  the  world  as  create  new  de- 
mands and  satisfy  them.  This  national  service 
could  do  the  things  which  need  to  be  done, 
but  which  are  not  now  being  done.  It  could 
have  for  its  aim  the  improvement  of  the  quality 
of  our  living.  Our  appalling  slovenliness,  the 
ignorance  of  great  masses  in  city  and  country 
as  to  the  elementary  technique  of  daily  life — 
this  should  be  the  enemy  of  the  army  of  youth. 
I  have  a  picture  of  a  host  of  eager  young  mis- 
sionaries swarming  over  the  land,  spreading 
the  health  knowledge,  the  knowledge  of  domestic 
science,  of  gardening,  of  tastefulness,  that  they 
have  learned  in  school. 

Such  a  service  would  provide  apprentices  for 
communal  services  in  town  and  country,  as 
many  schools  and  colleges  are  already  actually 
providing.  Food  inspection,  factory  inspection, 
organized  relief,  the  care  of  dependents,  play- 
ground service,  nursing  in  hospitals — all  this 
would  be  a  field  for  such  an  educational  service. 
On  a  larger  scale,  tree-planting,  the  care  and  re- 
pair of  roads,  work  on  conservation  projects, 
the  care  of  model  farms,  would  be  tasks  for  this 
army.  As  I  was  burning  caterpillars'  nests  the 
other  day  in  New  Jersey  and  saw  the  trees 
sinister  with  gray  webs,  I  thought  of  the  de- 


74  EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

stroying  army  of  youth  that  should  be  invading 
the  land  clearing  it  of  all  insect  pests.  We 
might  even  come  to  the  forcible  rebuilding  of 
the  slovenly  fences  and  outhouses  which  strew 
our  landscape,  and  to  an  imposition  of  clean- 
ness upon  our  American  countryside.  With  an 
army  of  youth  we  could  perform  all  those  serv- 
ices of  neatness  and  mercy  and  intelligence 
which  our  communities  now  know  how  to  per- 
form and  mean  to  perform,  but  have  not  the 
weapons  to  wield. 

The  army  could  be  organized  in  flying  squad- 
rons, so  that  its  youth  could  travel  widely  and 
see  and  serve  all  kinds  of  men  and  communi- 
ties. For  its  direction  we  would  need  that  new 
type  of  teacher-engineer-community-worker 
that  our  best  school  systems  are  already  pro- 
ducing. Scientific  schools,  schools  of  philan- 
thropy, are  turning  out  men  and  women  who 
could  step  into  their  places  as  non-commissioned 
officers  for  such  an  army.  The  service  could 
be  entirely  flexible.  Boys  and  girls  could 
learn  the  rudiments  of  their  trade  or  profession 
in  actual  service  with  the  army.  Book  studies 
could  be  carried  on,  and  college  learning  could 
come  to  its  own  as  the  intellectual  fertilizer  of 
a  wholesome   and  stimulating  life.    Athletics 


UNIVERSAL  SERVICE  75 

and  sports  would  be  an  integral  part  of  the  two 
years '  service.  There  would  be  long  periods  of 
camping  in  the  national  parks  or  upon  ocean 
beaches.  The  Boy  Scouts  and  Camp-Fire  Girls 
already  give  the  clue  to  such  an  enterprise. 

If  objection  is  made  that  this  national  educa- 
tional service  would  fail  to  bring  out  the  sterner 
qualities  of  heroism  and  self-sacrifice,  and 
would  not  be  a  genuine  moral  equivalent  for 
war,  the  answer  is  that  the  best  kind  of  a  moral 
equivalent  is  a  moral  sublimation.  We  want  to 
turn  the  energies  of  youth  away  from  their 
squandering  in  mere  defense  or  mere  drudgery. 
Our  need  is  to  learn  how  to  live  rather  than 
die ;  to  be  teachers  and  creators,  not  engines  of 
destruction;  to  be  inventors  and  pioneers,  not 
mere  defenders.  Our  cities  and  isolated-  farms 
alike  are  mute  witnesses  that  Americans  have 
never  learned  how  to  live.  Suppose  we  had  a 
national  service  which  was  making  a  determined 
assault  for  the  enhancement  of  living.  Would 
its  standards  and  discipline  be  less  rigorous? 
Rather  would  the  ingenuity  and  imagination 
have  to  be  of  the  finest. 

Some  such  conception  of  national  service  is 
the  only  one  which  will  give  us  that  thrill  of 
unity  and  vigor  which  we  seek.     An  educational 


76  EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

service  built  on  the  public  school  system  puts 
the  opportunity  in  our  hands.  The  raw  mate- 
rial in  attitudes  and  desires  is  here.  Every 
task  that  an  army  of  youth  might  perform  is 
already  being  done  in  some  school  or  college  or 
communal  service.  All  we  need  to  do  is  to  co- 
ordinate and  make  universal  what  is  now  hap- 
hazard and  isolated.  An  army  of  youth  which 
focused  school  work  would  provide  just  that 
purpose  that  educators  seek.  The  advocates  of 
*^ preparedness"  are  willing  to  spend  billions  on 
a  universal  military  service  which  is  neither 
universal  nor  educational  nor  productive. 
Cannot  we  begin  to  organize  a  true  national 
service  which  will  let  all  serve  creatively 
towards  the  toning  up  of  American  life? 


THE   SCHOOLS   FEOM   THE   OUTSIDE 

TO  persons  directing  any  complicated  or- 
ganization, criticism  from  outsiders  al- 
ways seems  either  futile  or  irrelevant.  Con- 
scious of  the  difficulty  that  has  been  met  in  cre- 
ating the  existing  machinery,  they  resent  the 
debonair  and  nonchalant  proposals  tossed  in 
upon  them  by  people  who  have  only  an  amateur- 
ish or  philosophical  interest  in  their  work. 
There  are  very  few  able  administrators  in  any 
work  who  do  not  honestly  believe  they  are  doing 
their  best  with  the  material  that  is  given  them. 
To  this  resentment  the  educational  world 
seems  particularly  prone.  The  teacher  finds 
it  intolerable  that  the  classroom  should  be 
judged  from  any  vantage-point  but  the  teacher's 
desk;  the  superintendent  is  annoyed  if  you  ar- 
raign his  system  in  the  light  of  the  product 
turned  out.  A  public  service  which  enlists  so 
much  conscientiousness  as  does  our  public 
school  system  is  naturally  sensitive  to  public 

77 


78  EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

criticism.  Its  very  sensitiveness  makes  it  diffi- 
cult for  it  to  distinguisli  between  criticism  of 
motives  and  criticism  of  policies  and  philoso- 
phies. 

This  resentment  to  amateur  criticism  is  offset 
by  an  almost  pathetic  trust  in  expert  overhaul- 
ing. Letters  from  school  principals  to  those 
in  charge  of  recent  investigations  into  city 
school  systems  imply  that  the  expert  has  some 
kind  of  magical  power  not  possessed  by  the 
ordinary  teacher  or  administrator.  When  we 
learn,  however,  that  the  defects  discovered  are 
usually  of  so  elementary  and  obvious  a  char- 
acter that  few  interested  laymen  could  have 
ignored  them,  we  suspect  that  the  magic  is  not 
so  much  a  matter  of  the  expert  as  it  is  of  the 
outsider.  The  thing  is  to  get  a  new  point-of- 
view,  a  new  interpretation,  which  shall  not  be  so 
obsessed  with  the  inside  workings  of  the  ma- 
chinery that  the  drift  of  policy  and  the  value 
of  the  human  product  is  ignored. 

Educators,  it  is  true,  ^*  welcome  fair  criti- 
cism," and  they  have  a  fond  belief  that  they 
get  it  from  one  another  in  the  educational  press. 
But  in  this  mass  of  books  and  journals,  crowded 
with  exposition  and  discussion  of  current  edu- 
cational conceptions  and  technical  methods,  the 


SCHOOLS  FROM  THE  OUTSIDE       79 

whole  setting,  language,  philosophy,  are  pro- 
fessional. The  very  bases  and  premises  which 
the  lay  critic  wishes  to  criticize  are  taken  for 
granted.  Educators  decry  ^^destructive"  criti- 
cism, but  in  a  sense  all  criticism  is  destructive, 
for  it  is  essentially  an  examination.  It  requires 
a  stripping  away  of  the  wrappings  of  routine 
and  jargon,  the  turning  of  the  idea  about  on  all 
sides,  the  placing  of  it  in  a  light  where  it  may 
be  clearly  observed.  There  is  another  reason 
why  amateur  criticism  is  likely  to  be  pertinent 
in  education.  The  whole  business  of  teaching 
and  learning  is  a  matter  of  personal  psychology, 
and,  in  spite  of  current  cant,  there  is  no  science 
so  elusive  and  so  unformulated  as  psychology. 
If  the  scientists  will  no  longer  deal  with  the 
problems  of  the  personal,  conscious  life,  it  is 
left  for  the  amateur  philosophers  to  examine  the 
psychological  backgrounds  of  the  teaching 
world,  and  attempt  newer  and  more  personal 
interpretations. 

Much  of  the  public  criticism  of  the  school  is 
no  doubt  unintelligent,  but  what  are  we  to  say 
of  that  blanket  defense  we  hear  so  often  from 
the  educator,  that  the  niggardliness  of  the  pub- 
lic prevents  his  providing  the  best  schools  and 
the  best  teachers?    Now  a  country  that  at- 


80  EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

tempts  almost  universally  to  provide  free  sec- 
ondary school  education — something  provided 
in  no  European  country — is  certainly  not  thus 
guilty.  The  prestige  of  education  in  America 
is  extraordinarily  high.  It  is  quite  too  late  in 
the  day  to  pretend  that  anyone  still  regards 
public  schools  as  a  charity,  or  that  ridicule  of 
teaching  methods  would  only  serve  to  discredit 
the  schools  and  reduce  the  already  small  appro- 
priations. There  is  no  more  fear — though 
some  of  our  educators  would  have  us  believe 
it — ^that  free  criticism  of  the  school  will  leave 
us  school-less  than  there  is  that  denunciation 
of  the  New  York  police  resulted  in  leaving  that 
city  without  police  protection.  The  public 
schools  in  this  country  have  the  standing  of  all 
other  public  services. 

It  is  not  a  question  of  more  money,  but  of 
more  intelligent  use  of  present  resources.  The 
inexpert  public  cannot  be  expected  to  spend  its 
money  wisely.  It  has  an  incorrigible  itch  for 
objective  results.  It  likes  to  see  its  money  go 
into  handsome  buildings  with  expensive  equip- 
ments. Large  sums  are  spent  in  emulative 
waste.  If  one  town  boasts  a  seventy-five  thou- 
sand dollar  high  school,  its  neighbor  must  have 
a  hundred  thousand  dollar  one.    It  is  obvious 


SCHOOLS  FROM  THE  OUTSIDE       81 

that  money  which  goes  into  costly  venti- 
lating systems  and  the  adoption  of  uncriti- 
cized  fads,  does  not  go  into  teachers' 
salaries.  But  it  is  the  function  of  the  educa- 
tors to  offset  this  public  childishness  with  their 
own  wisdom,  and  see  that  the  public  money  is 
profitably  spent.  If  they  believe  that  we  could 
have  better  teachers  if  we  paid  more  for  them, 
they  should  see  that  the  money  goes  to  the 
teachers  and  not  into  fussy  mechanical  details. 

The  trend  of  educational  activity  has  been  to 
encourage  this  objective  standard.  More  of 
the  intellectual  energy  of  the  educational  world 
has  gone  into  technique  and  organization  than 
into  psychology.  It  has  been  more  interested 
in  seeing  that  the  American  child  had  enough 
cubic  feet  of  air,  a  hygienic  desk,  and  a  fire- 
proof building,  than  that  he  acquired  an  alert 
and  curious  outlook  on  the  modern  world,  and 
an  expressive  personality.  France,  with  pub- 
lic school  buildings,  even  in  Paris,  that  you 
would  scarcely  perhaps  stable  your  horse  in, 
somehow,  by  making  expression  the  insistent 
motive  of  education,  turns  out  intellectual  pro- 
ducts strikingly  superior  to  our  own. 

European  experience  tends,  too,  to  challenge 
the  common  assumption  of  American  educators 


82  EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

that  quality  of  teaching  is  proportional  to  sal- 
aries paid.  American  salaries  are  certainly  as 
high  as  those  paid  in  European  countries. 
There  is  no  violent  contrast,  moreover,  between 
the  intellectual  and  educational  background  of 
a  primary  teacher  with  seven  hundred  a  year 
and  a  principal  with  twenty-five  hundred.  They 
would  both  subscribe  to  the  same  philosophy  of 
life ;  they  might  easily  have  come  from  the  same 
training-school.  The  difference  would  be  one 
of  age  or  executive  capacity,  or  of  ^^experi- 
ence,'' which  generally  means  nothing  more 
than  greater  expertness  with  routine  and  a 
longer  setting  of  the  intellectual  cement. 

It  is  this  background,  spirit,  philosophy,  be- 
hind the  educational  mind  that  the  critical  pub- 
lic is  becoming  more  and  more  restless  about. 
It  does  not  challenge  details  of  mechanical  and 
administrative  organization.  These  have  been 
worked  out  with  an  ingenuity  and  a  complete- 
ness all  too  thorough.  The  public  is  demanding 
now  a  similar  attention  to  the  conscious  and 
spiritual  side  of  learning  and  teaching.  The 
ideal  of  the  school  as  an  embryonic  community 
life,  of  the  child  as  a  growing  personality  to 
whom  the  activity  of  the  school  must  have  in- 
tense reality,  of  education  as  the  training  of  ex- 


SCHOOLS  FROM  THE  OUTSIDE       83 

pression,  creation — this  has  hardly  begun  to  be 
generally  felt.  The  faults  discovered  by  the 
Springfield  and  Portland  school  surveys  arose 
largely  from  a  careless  and  mechanical  philoso- 
phy of  life,  an  educational  philosophy  that  had 
not  sufficiently  emphasized  these  ideals.  The 
investigators  were  able,  for  instance,  to  tell  on 
the  moment  whether  a  teacher  had  come  from 
a  certain  training-school  by  her  method  and 
attitudes. 

The  responsibility  cannot  be  dodged  by  the 
professional  educators.  They  are  responsible 
for  primitive  and  mechanical  attitudes  which 
make  so  much  of  the  orthodox  public  school 
teaching  a  mere  marking  of  time  rather  than 
an  education.  Millions  of  the  public's  money 
would  not  effect  this  change  in  the  background 
of  the  teaching  world.  That  background  could 
be  changed  without  its  costing  the  public  a  cent. 
The  difficulty,  huge,  it  is  true,  like  any  other  at- 
tempt to  change  the  obscure  and  uncriticized 
assumptions  that  lie  at  the  bottom  of  any  theory 
or  practice,  is  psychological,  not  mechanical. 
It  involves  only  the  substitution,  for  certain  un- 
democratic, ultra-logical  ideas,  of  ideas  more 
congenial  to  the  time  and  social  situation  in 
which  we  live. 


XI 

THE   PORTLAND   SCHOOL   SURVEY 

IF  we  are  to  have  better  schools  in  our  cities 
we  must  know  what  kind  of  schools  we  have 
now.  In  an  attempt  to  tell  us,  the  school  sur- 
vey has  in  the  last  few  years  been  developed 
with  an  admirable  technique,  and  the  passion 
for  being  surveyed  has  spread  to  cities  large 
and  small.  No  more  illuminating  document 
has  come  out  of  this  effort  than  the  recently 
published  study  of  the  school  system  of  Port- 
land, Oregon.  It  stirs  enthusiasm  because  it 
shows  the  progress  that  has  been  made  in  clari- 
fying the  current  problems  and  the  ideals  which 
must  be  realized  if  the  public  school  is  to  pre- 
pare the  child  of  to-day  for  intelligent  partici- 
pation in  the  society  of  which  he  will  form  a 
part.  Compared  with  the  investigations  in 
New  York  City  and  Springfield,  Illinois,  this 
Portland  survey,  under  the  direction  of  Pro- 
fessor Cubberley  of  Stanford  University,  repre- 
sents a  new  achievement  in  educational  think- 
ing.   Those  surveys  contented  themselves  with 

84 


PORTLAND  SCHOOL  SURVEY       85 

a  criticism  of  details,  or,  at  best,  with  a  vague 
groping  for  constructive  plan.  The  Portland 
survey  represents  a  definite  break  with  the 
tradition.  It  is  characterized  by  a  clear  idea 
not  only  of  how  the  system  fails  to  meet  the 
modern  demands,  but  of  how  these  demands  can 
be  met. 

The  investigators  cannot,  of  course,  explain 
how  it  is  that  one  of  the  wealthiest  and  most 
comfortable  of  American  cities,  a  city  at  once 
entirely  modern  and  homogeneously  American, 
should  have  the  most  mechanical  and  form- 
alistic  school  system  these  educators  had  ever 
seen.  One  gets  the  sense  of  how  without 
leadership  the  school  may  become  a  little  back- 
water in  a  community.  In  Portland,  a  city  of 
250,000  people,  commercial  and  residential 
center  for  the  great  Northwest,  these  investiga- 
tors found  the  ^^maintenance  unchanged  of  a 
rigidly  prescribed  mechanical  system  poorly 
adapted  to  the  needs  either  of  children  or  com- 
munity.'' ^'Universal  practice,"  they  say,  **is 
enlisted  in  the  maintenance  of  a  rigid,  minutely 
and  mechanically  prescribed  system  of  instruc- 
tion, organization,  administration,  supervision, 
examination  and  inspection.  Any  change  in 
this  elaborate  mechanism  meets  with  resistance. 


86  EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

positive  as  well  as  negative.  So  far  as  this 
system  is  adapted  at  any  point  to  the  actual 
needs  of  the  individual  children  and  youth  that 
come  under  it,  so  far  as  it  is  adapted  to  the 
needs  of  the  communities  for  adequately  trained 
recruits  to  serve  the  community,  the  adaptation 
is  accidental,  not  the  result  of  intelligence  now 
operative  at  that  point." 

This  is  a  criticism  of  an  American  institution, 
and  Portland  might  be  any  large  American  city 
which  has  not  had  an  educational  awakening. 
The  survey  is  significant  because  it  shows  the 
machinery  and  motives  of  public  school  educa- 
tion in  this  country  for  the  last  generation  not 
only  in  Portland  but  in  a  city  like  New  York, 
whose  militaristic,  mechanical  system  is  now 
being  thrown  into  convulsions  by  the  sudden 
challenge  of  the  new  type  of  school  embodied 
in  the  Gary  plan.  Indeed  this  Portland  survey 
is  a  much  better  survey  of  New  York  school 
conditions  than  the  elaborate  Hanus  inquiry 
which  was  made  a  few  years  ago. 

The  viciousnesses  which  the  investigators 
found  in  the  Portland  system  are  those  which 
are  familiar  to  all  who  feel  the  defects  of  their 
own  schooling,  or  have  set  about  to  examine  the 
reasons   for   the   poor   quality   of   the   school 


PORTLAND  SCHOOL  SURVEY   87 

output.  On  the  administrative  side  there  are 
all  the  evils  that  come  from  retaining  a  scheme 
of  amateur  control  in  a  system  which  has  of 
necessity  become  professionalized.  A  board 
which  is  directing  a  village  school  must  keep 
all  school  matters  under  its  supervision.  But 
when  that  village  has  become  a  vast  city,  a 
school  board  which  keeps  the  strings  in  its  own 
hands  is  simply  manufacturing  wastefulness 
and  inefficiency.  A  lay  board  which  employs 
highly  paid  and  highly  trained  principals,  su- 
pervisors, etc.,  and  then  insists  on  directing  all 
business — from  the  engaging  of  janitors  and 
the  personal  selection  of  teachers  to  the  suspen- 
sion of  by-laws  whereby  a  schoolroom  may  be 
leased  for  an  evening  lecture  or  a  teacher  ex- 
cused to  attend  the  funeral  of  her  grandmother 
— labels  itself  as  archaic  and  unfit.  It  is  one 
of  the  cardinal  principles  of  modern  political 
and  industrial  organization  that  it  is  a  waste  of 
money  to  pay  salaries  large  enough  to  buy  judg- 
ment, discretion  and  expert  skill  and  then  not 
permit  them  to  be  used. 

This  refusal  to  delegate  responsibility,  the 
investigators  found,  paralyzed  initiative  all 
through  the  school  system.  Nothing  could  be 
done  without  reference  to  an  untrained  body  of 


88  EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

laymen  who,  however  conscientious  they  might 
be,  must  usually  decide  spasmodically  and  with- 
out any  definite  educational  policy.  Indeed 
their  conscientiousness  is  often  a  positive  vice. 
Shiftlessness  on  their  part  would  have  permit- 
ted initiative  on  the  parts  of  principals  and 
teachers.  Under  present  conditions  the  dis- 
tinction between  good  teachers  and  bad  fades 
out.  The  concern  of  every  one  becomes  to 
keep  the  machinery  going,  not  to  criticize  the 
work  and  keep  it  adapted  to  the  individual  apti- 
tudes of  the  children. 

This  administrative  lifelessness  has  its  coun- 
terpart in  a  pedagogical  routine  the  focus  of 
which  is  the  '^course  of  study.''  The  curricu- 
lum is  uniform  for  all  children.  It  is  ^Vivi- 
sected into  fifty-four  dead  pieces,"  laid  down 
in  pages  in  certain  adopted  textbooks.  ^'The 
only  thought  devoted  to  the  formulation  of  the 
course  of  study,''  say  the  investigators,  ^^was 
the  simple  mathematical  thought  necessary  to 
parcel  out  the  pages  of  the  books."  The  teach- 
•  er's  duty  is  to  haul  the  pupil  through  the  course 
of  study.  This  is  done  by  means  of  the  formal 
recitation,  where  *' pupils  answer  hollow  word- 
questions  with  memorized  hollow  word-state- 
ments."   Term    examinations    discover    how 


POETLAND  SCHOOL  SURVEY       89 

many  of  these  word-statements  are  left  in  the 
pupils '  minds.  An  elaborate  system  of  inspec- 
tion and  supervision  exists  to  check  up  and 
grade  both  teachers  and  principals  and  ensure 
that  the  hallowed  '^course  of  study"  is  fully 
being  carried  out.  Many  of  the  teachers  are 
trained  in  the  local  schools  and  turned  back  into 
the  system  to  perpetuate  these  methods.  A 
state  tenure-of-oflSce  act  keeps  all  teachers  in 
their  places. 

The  effect  upon  the  children  is  logical.  The 
school  becomes  an  automatic  process  of  elimina- 
tion. Those  who  can  be  hauled  through  the 
course  of  study  are  hauled.  Those  whose  tal- 
ents do  not  lie  in  the  capacity  to  memorize 
printed  pages  pass  out  of  the  school  or  become 
hopelessly  mired  in  the  lower  grades.  ^^If  the 
sixteen-year-old  child  has  not  yet  transferred  to 
his  memory  Parts  37  to  54,  inclusive,  of  the 
dead  and  comminuted  curriculum,  the  chief  con- 
stituents of  which  are  abstract  arithmetic  and 
technical  grammar,  then  he  must  begin  with 
Part  37  and  appropriate  that  and  each  of  the 
succeeding  17  Parts  in  order,  before  he  can  even 
be  associated  with  youth  of  approximately  his 
own  age,  and  before  he  can  engage  in  study 
suited  to  his  age  and  condition — study  and  ex- 


90  EDUCATION  AND  LIVINa 

ercises  that  will  be  of  immediate  and  practical 
value  to  him.  in  the  effort  he  must  shortly  make 
to  serve  society  for  the  sake  of  his  own  liveli- 
hood." And  this  system,  formulated  and  ap- 
proved twenty  years  ago  by  high  educational 
authorities,  the  survey  stigmatizes  as  valuable 
only  in  its  ^^  cheapness  and  facility  of  adminis- 
tration, and  the  relief  that  it  affords  educa- 
tional officers  and  teachers  from  all  responsibil- 
ity of  knowing  and  of  meeting  the  individual 
needs  of  their  pupils." 

This  type  of  public  school,  so  bald  and  gro- 
tesque in  the  sober  pages  of  the  Portland  sur- 
vey that  it  seems  more  like  the  ritual  of  some 
primitive  tribe  than  the  deliberate  educational 
activity  of  an  enlightened  American  commu- 
nity, is  yet  the  type  that  still  prevails  in  the 
majority  of  our  cities.  This  is  the  fact  that 
we  must  face.  Yet  a  community  that  asks  to  be 
surveyed  is  a  community  dissatisfied  with  itself. 
Other  communities  are  likely  to  stir  uneasily, 
and  ask  themselves  why,  if  Los  Angeles  and 
Indianapolis  and  Gary  can  have  modern  and 
fruitful  public  school  systems,  other  cities 
should  not.  We  may  even  hope  that  it  is  the 
last  of  the  old  system  and  the  promise  of  the 
school  of  to-morrow. 


XII 

WHAT   IS   EXPERIMENTAL   EDUCATION? 

AT  a  time  when  more  people  are  thinking 
intelligently  about  American  education 
than  ever  before,  it  is  unfortunate  that  there 
should  be  any  confusion  between  the  widely  di- 
verse trails  that  experimentation  is  opening  up 
to  the  modern  school.  It  is  becoming  increas- 
ingly evident  that  the  * '  experimentaP '  in  edu- 
cation does  not  at  all  mean  the  same  thing  to 
educational  administrators  as  it  does  to  edu- 
cational idealists.  ^^Experimental  education" 
has  not  yet  been  pitted  in  competition  against 
the  * ^ experimental  school,"  but  it  is  not  un- 
likely that  the  different  techniques  which  they 
suggest  may  come  to  seem  hostile  to  each  other, 
and  so  the  real  values  of  both  be  lost.  At  pres- 
ent the  two  seem  to  be  developing  in  a  fairly 
complete  disregard  of  each  other.  It  would  be 
dangerous  for  American  education  to  tangle  it- 
self in  the  dilemma  of  choosing  between  them. 
On  the  other  hand,  it  would  be  even  more  dis- 

91 


92  EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

astrous  to  confuse  them.  If  we  attempt  to 
apply  the  quantitative  standards  of  the  new 
*^ experimental  education'^  to  the  life  of  the 
^^experimental  school,"  or  to  infuse  the  quali- 
tative ideals  of  the  ^^experimental  school"  into 
the  technique  of  ^'experimental  education,"  we 
run  the  risk  of  spoiling  that  modern  and  so- 
cially-adjusted school  towards  which  we  are  all 
feeling  our  way. 

When  the  inventive  school  superintendent  or 
professor  of  education  speaks  of  '*  experimental 
education,"  he  is  thinking,  not  of  the  ''model 
school,"  but  of  the  new  standard  tests  in  the 
fundamental  subjects  by  which  the  work  of 
large  masses  of  public  school  children  is  being 
regularly  measured  and  compared.  The  city 
school  survey  has  elaborated  a  technique  of  in- 
tellectual measurements  which  is  giving  us  very 
rapidly  a  genuine  quantitative  science  of  educa- 
tion. A  report  like  Pro|fesor  Judd's  in  the 
''Cleveland  Survey" — "Measuring  the  Work 
of  the  Public  Schools" — ^is  a  storehouse  of  sug- 
gestiveness  for  all  who  like  to  see  how  mathe- 
matics can  be  fruitfully  applied  to  living. 
These  statistical  studies  measure  accurately  the 
performance  of  children  in  the  different  grades 
and  at  different  ages  in  the  specific  literate 


EXPEEIMENTAL  EDUCATION       93 

skills  which  everybody  needs  even  to  start 
fairly  in  the  race  of  opportunity.  The  stand- 
ard tests  have  been  worked  out  experimentally 
with  great  numbers  of  school-children  so  that 
average  norms  of  accomplishment  can  be  set 
for  any  class  or  any  individual.  Eates  of  speed 
and  quality  of  handwriting,  and  their  relation  to 
each  other;  ability  to  spell  common  words;  rate 
and  capacity  of  accurate  figuring;  rate  and 
quality  of  silent  and  oral  reading; — ^these  are 
the  aptitudes  that  are  rigidly  measured  by  the 
tests.  The  children  are  treated  as  segregated 
arithmetical  minds,  reading  minds,  spelling 
minds,  as  units  of  intellectual  behavior.  The 
tests  are  not  ^^examinations,"  for  they  do  not 
aim  to  show  any  absolute  attainment  of  ^^knowl- 
edge." Their  value  is  in  the  comparison  they 
afford  of  individual  skill,  and  of  deviations 
from  a  norm  of  effectiveness.  In  the  mass  of 
scores  you  have  an  intellectual  relief  map  of 
your  class,  your  school,  your  city  system. 

Now  nothing  could  apparently  be  more  deadly 
and  mechanical  than  this  treating  of  living  chil- 
dren as  if  they  were  narrowly  isolated  minds. 
In  this  ^'experimental  education"  we  are  evi- 
dently in  another  world  from  the  '^  experimental 
school."    Yet  out  of  these  tests  emerge  the 


94  EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

most  important  implications  for  modern  educa- 
tion. Out  of  this  ' '  experimental  education ' '  we 
at  last  get  a  scientific  basis  for  the  *^  modern 
school."  For  we  have  irrefutable  proof  of  the 
enormous  diversity  of  minds  and  aptitudes. 
We  have  a  demonstration  of  the  utter  foolish- 
ness of  subjecting  children  to  a  uniform  edu- 
cational process.  We  have  accurate  proof  of 
the  fallacy  of  the  ^^ average"  in  education. 
These  tests  are  added  proof  of  the  unscientific 
character  of  the  typical  public  school  on  that 
very  technical  and  administrative  side  which 
has  been  most  carefully  developed.  The  graded 
school  was  a  brilliant  invention  for  its  time,  but 
the  bases  of  classification  are  shown  by  these 
new  tests  to  be  absurd.  Children  are  now  clas- 
sified, for  purposes  of  education,  largely  by  age 
and  average  standing.  The  tests  show  that 
neither  category  has  the  slightest  relevance 
for  effective  learning.  We  classify  things  for 
the  purpose  of  doing  something  to  them.  Any 
classification  which  does  not  assist  manipulation 
is  worse  than  useless.  But  mere  numerical  age 
is  no  clue  whatsoever  to  mental  or  even  physio- 
logical age,  and  minds  with  the  same  average 
may  plot  out  very  differently  for  every  individ- 
ual one  of  the  various  skills  and  interests  that 


EXPEEIMENTAL  EDUCATION       95 

elementary  training  involves.  Our  educational 
grading  has  been  as  sentimental  and  sterile  as 
the  ancient  philosophers'  classification  of  mat- 
ter into  earth,  water,  fire,  air.  Such  a  concep- 
tion of  the  world  was  interesting,  but  there  was 
nothing  you  could  do  with  it.  All  the  school  has 
done  with  its  classifying  has  been  to  get  the  chil- 
dren into  groups  where  they  could  be  dosed  with 
an  orderly  sequence  of  lessons.  There  has  been 
no  handle  by  which  their  heterogeneous  minds 
and  wills  could  be  taken  hold  of  and  directed. 
The  rule  of  the  classroom  is  necessarily  mili- 
tary, because  such  diverse  people  could  only  be 
unified  in  the  most  objective  and  external  and 
coercive  way.  No  internal  control  would  be 
possible.  So  the  teacher  must  devote  a  large 
part  of  her  educational  energy  to  the  mere  busi- 
ness of  policing.  When  she  actually  ^^ taught," 
it  was  only  the  average  child  that  she  could 
really  address — the  fairly  bright  mediocrity. 
The  other  pupils  wasted  their  time  almost  in 
direct  proportion  to  their  deviation  above  or 
below  that  average.  Children  passed  up 
through  their  educational  life  on  the  basis  of  an 
^* average  mark,"  which  represented  nothing 
whatever  but  a  number.  The  standard  tests 
have  shown  repeatedly  that  ability  is  so  un- 


96  EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

evenly  distributed  that  the  brightest  fourth- 
year  children  overlap  the  poorest  eighth-year 
children.  However  children  may  average, 
scarcely  two  children  in  the  same  class  will  ever 
be  found  to  have  the  identical  capacity  in  the 
different  subjects.  The  tests  reveal  not  only 
that  children  differ,  but  just  how  curiously  and 
widely  they  do  differ. 

The  traditional  classification  is  enough  to 
wreck  any  educational  system,  even  without  the 
deadness  of  the  curriculum.  With  the  pro- 
gressive congestion  of  the  public  schools,  teach- 
ing has  become  more  and  more  impossible.  The 
traditional  system  of  grading  has  successfully 
resisted  most  improvement  in  teaching,  and  vi- 
tiated the  newer  values  that  have  been  brought 
into  the  school.  If  children,  clearly  not  de- 
fective, cannot  learn  arithmetic,  read  slowly  and 
unintelligently,  spell  chaotically  and  write  a 
slovenly  hand,  question  the  grading  system. 
Never  have  there  been  such  admirable  tech- 
niques for  teaching  these  fundamental  things. 
But  the  classification  defies  them.  The  ^^ class" 
gives  the  teacher  no  leverage  for  improving  the 
children's  skill.  An  unscientific  grading  is  as 
much  a  barrier  to  altering  minds  as  it  is  to 
changing  materials. 


EXPERIMENTAL  EDUCATION       97 

These  truths  seem  elementary  and  obvious, 
yet  we  had  to  wait  for  this  *^  experimental  edu- 
cation'^ to  shake  complacency  in  the  ^^  graded 
school/'  Now  if  we  accept  these  tests  we  have 
to  conclude  that  it  is  useless  to  grade  children 
for  education  unless  those  ^* grades"  correspond 
accurately  and  specifically  to  the  capacities  of 
the  children.  Work  must  be  done  in  each  spe- 
cific subject  with — and  only  with — those  who 
have  approximately  the  same  capacity.  The 
'^average''  is  totally  unknown  in  that  ^^real 
life"  which  we  are  constantly  forced  to  set  up 
in  antithesis  to  the  school.  In  no  function  of 
life  is  any  one  going  to  be  judged  by  a  compos- 
ite ability  to  read,  write,  spell,  figure.  One  suc- 
ceeds not  through  any  average  skill  or  average 
information,  but  through  the  ability  to  throw 
all  one's  skill  and  all  one's  intelligence  where  it 
is  demanded.  A  measurement  of  intelligence 
by  averages  will  always  produce  just  that  inef- 
fectiveness and  vagueness  for  which  the  prod- 
ucts of  the  public  school  are  censured  at  pres- 
ent. 

The  fallacy  of  the  educational  ^^ average"  in- 
volves another  fallacy,  equally  obvious  but 
equally  prevalent.  This  is  the  fallacy  of  the 
*^ partially  perfect."    The  school  ranks  the  sev- 


98  EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

enty  per  cent,  child  equal  to  the  hundred  per 
cent,  child.  Children  pass  to  more  difficult 
work  on  an  admitted  basis  of  imperfect  accom- 
plishment. But  for  any  real  effectiveness  in 
the  world  it  is  not  enough  to  be  habitually  only 
seventy  per  cent,  right.  Whenever  you  need  to 
be  literate,  the  world  demands  that  you  be  ac- 
tually literate.  If  you  have  information,  you 
are  either  useless  or  dangerous  unless  your  in- 
formation is  accurate.  It  is  better  not  to  know 
arithmetic  at  all  than  persistently  to  make  only 
seven  hits  out  of  ten.  For  all  practical  pur- 
poses your  child  is  as  much  a  failure  at  seventy 
per  cent,  as  he  is  at  zero  per  cent.  It  will  avail 
him  little  to  be  able  to  read  and  write  and  figure 
at  a  rate  and  an  excellence  only  seventy  per 
cent,  of  the  standard.  In  any  situation  which 
requires  these  elementary  skills  he  will  be  al- 
most as  much  handicapped  as  if  he  were  entirely 
illiterate.  It  is  time  that  the  school  faced  the 
bitter  truth  that  life  demands  an  approximate 
perfection  in  whatever  one  tries  to  do.  Educa- 
tion must  shape  all  its  technique  towards  this 
approximate  perfection.  It  is  not  necessary 
that  all  should  do  the  same  thing.  But  it  is 
necessary  that  what  one  pretends  to  do  one 
should  succeed  gradually  in  doing.    The  indi- 


EXPERIMENTAL  EDUCATION       99 

vidual  who  is  allowed  to  persist  continuously  on 
a  level  of  imperfect  acomplishnaent  is  not  being 
educated.  For  him  education  is  a  failure.  He 
should  either  drop  his  technique,  or  ways  should 
be  found  to  improve  him  towards  mastery. 
What  children  are  learning  at  any  one  time 
they  should  be  learning  with  a  sense  of  con- 
trol. The  more  difficult  should  not  be  con- 
fronted till  the  less  difficult  has  been  absorbed. 
And  this  controlled  progress  will  be  possible 
only  in  a  school  where  children  work  with  their 
equals.  Classification  in  education  should  be 
based  only  on  specific  proficiency. 

The  new  ^^experimental  education^'  is  en- 
gaged in  making  dramatic  in  the  schools  these 
truths.  It  is  a  force  even  more  revolutionary 
than  the  idealism  of  the  *' experimental  school." 
The  situation  suggested  by  the  ^' curve  of  dis- 
tribution" is  one  of  the  most  momentous  facts 
to  be  reckoned  with  by  us  of  to-day.  It  is  mak- 
ing over  our  theories  of  democracy,  social  re- 
form and  social  progress.  To  work  out  its 
manifold  implications  in  the  school  is  to  touch 
the  very  nerve  of  our  democratic  future. 


XIII 

THE   ORGANIC   SCHOOL 

THE  Fairhope  Summer  School,  which  has 
just  closed  its  season  (Sept.,  1915),  at 
Greenwich,  Connecticut,  has  given  to  Northern 
people  an  opportunity  to  see  at  work  Mrs.  Mari- 
etta Johnson's  widely  known  ideal  of  ^^ organic 
education. '^  Just  as  the  Gary  plan  has  shown 
how  the  city  school  may  give  a  varied  training 
to  great  masses  of  children  with  a  freedom  and 
flexibility  never  believed  possible,  so  Mrs.  John- 
son has  demonstrated  how  the  small  commu- 
nity, or  even  household,  by  using  the  natural 
environment  and  the  natural  needs  as  labora- 
tory and  workshop,  may  adjust  the  child  to  life 
far  more  accurately  than  any  formal  school. 
No  school  carries  out  more  carefully  Professor 
Dewey's  dictum  that  the  child  can  only  be  edu- 
cated by  concerning  himself  with  what  has 
meaning  to  him  as  a  child,  and  not  what  is  to 
have  meaning  to  him  later  as  an  adult. 
In  the  organic  school,  children  grow  up  nat- 

100 


THE  ORGANIC  SCiHtiOL  lOl 

urally  and  healthfully,  playing  out-of-doors,  fol- 
lowing their  curiosities,  learning  as  their  life 
makes  demands  upon  them.  The  teacher  is 
there  to  answer  their  questions,  to  sharpen  their 
wits,  to  name  for  them  and  analyze  the  flowers 
and  soil  and  trees,  to  show  how  to  plant  vege- 
tables and  build  little  coops  or  houses.  In  their 
winter  school  at  the  single-tax  colony  of  Fair- 
hope,  Alabama,  on  the  shores  of  Mobile  Bay, 
the  children  can  be  out  in  the  open  air  almost 
every  day.  The  land  is  a  complete  geological, 
botanical,  and  physical  laboratory,  and  the 
household  a  natural  classroom  where  they  learn 
to  live.  The  school  grew,  in  fact,  quite  natur- 
ally out  of  the  household,  and  the  necessity  for 
some  sort  of  school  in  a  community  where  there 
was  none.  Mrs.  Johnson,  with  her  teacher's 
genius,  simply  sharpened  and  arranged  her  in- 
tercourse with  the  children  around  her,  and 
presently  had  a  school  which  has  become  one  of 
the  most  interesting  in  the  country. 

Its  very  informality  is  its  charm  and  success. 
The  hundred  or  more  children  are  not  classified 
in  grades,  but  in  ^4ife-classes,"  which  corre- 
spond roughly  to  those  three  periods  in  child 
life — the  first  seven  years  of  growth,  the  years 
to    adolescence,    and   early    adolescence.     The 


J9:^         EDUC^ATiON  AND  LIVING 

first  class  is  really  an  outgrowth  of  the  nursery. 
In  the  cool  rooms  of  the  Fairhope  Summer 
School  one  comes  upon  little  farmhouses  and 
villages  and  doll-houses  of  building-blocks, 
which  form  the  basis  for  getting  acquainted 
with  the  village  the  children  lived  in.  The  next 
group  is  characterized  by  a  tough  practicality, 
a  capacity  for  drill  and  persistence,  and  this 
*4ife-class''  was  found  in  the  wood-working 
shop  and  garden.  Literary  studies  are  taken 
up  very  late  by  the  third  class,  whose  recita- 
tions are  rather  informal  discussions  in  an  out- 
door cluster  around  the  teacher.  Only  when  a 
broad  background  of  acquaintance  with  real 
things  is  obtained,  practical  powers  of  observa- 
tion acquired,  and  an  actual  need  felt  for  learn- 
ing what  books  can  tell,  are  the  conventional 
school  studies  begun.  In  the  organic  school 
there  is  thus  some  chance  left  to  the  children 
for  getting  real  meanings  and  not  mere  words 
and  phrases  which  they  may  glibly  repeat. 
Reading  and  writing  are  not  taught  by  drill,  but 
are  picked  up  by  the  child  from  the  teacher  or 
the  other  children,  in  the  Eousseauan  fashion, 
whenever  he  finds  that  he  is  missing  something 
very  important  and  interesting  in  not  having 
this  skill. 


THE  OEGANIC  SCHOOL  103 

Learning  in  this  kind  of  school  becomes  as 
natural  as  eating.  One  learns  when  one  is  hun- 
gry to  understand  what  is  going  on  in  the  world. 
Such  schools,  it  will  be  said,  are  all  very  well 
as  an  ideal,  but  where  can  teachers  be  found  to 
direct  them?  Certainly  many  of  Mrs.  John- 
son's children  could  teach  others  in  the  way 
they  have  learned  themselves.  The  way  to  get 
teachers  for  this  free  organic  education  in  the 
'^schools  of  to-morrow''  is  clearly  to  teach  more 
children  in  the  same  way. 


XIV 

COMMUNITIES   FOR   CHILDREN 

ME.  WIET'S  schools  at  Gary  are  gexmine 
public  schools,  in  the  sense  that  they  pro- 
vide for  every  kind  of  child  in  the  community 
and  draw  into  themselves  the  main  aspects  of 
the  community  life.  They  are  not  artificial 
training-schools  for  vocations  or  for  life;  they 
are  a  life  itself.  ^^The  public  school  is  still 
merely  the  old  private  school  publicly  sup- 
ported," he  says.  The  change  of  support 
has  not  really  made  it  a  different  kind 
of  a  school.  It  has  not  really  grown  up 
to  urban  demands.  School-boards  usually  act 
as  if  they  were  handling  private  property. 
They  gravely  discuss  ^^  wider  use  of  the  school 
plant"  as  if  this  were  some  gracious  extension 
of  privilege.  The  public  does  not  yet  feel  that 
the  schools  are  its  own.  Organization,  admin- 
istration, instruction,  are  highly  authoritative, 
doctrinaire.  The  ideal  has  been  uniformity  in 
methods  and  product.    The  educational  system 

104 


COMMUNITIES  FOE  CHILDEEN      105 

has  become  as  autocratic  and  military  as  the  in- 
dustrial. As  for  content,  the  curriculum  is  the 
old  medieval  one,  not  transformed,  but  patched 
up,  in  the  good  old  Anglo-Saxon  way,  as  in- 
terests which  had  been  the  concern  of  the  few 
were  gradually  demanded  by  the  many.  Art 
study,  nature  study,  physical  education,  science, 
organized  play,  manual  training,  have  been 
added  to  the  public  school  work.  But  these  new 
interests  and  activities  have  become  simply  ad- 
ditional ^* subjects,*'  taught  in  much  the  same 
spirit  as  the  old.  The  problem  of  the  educator 
has  been,  not  how  may  the  new  activity  vitalize 
and  transform  the  others,  but  how  can  it  be  in- 
troduced with  the  least  disturbance  to  what  is 
already  there.  The  present  discussion  of  pro- 
fessional educators  about  vocational  training 
shows  the  same  mechanical  effort  to  introduce 
an  alien  activity  into  the  traditional  curriculum 
in  such  manner  that  the  latter  may  remain  in- 
tact. 

Mr.  Wirt's  own  school  is  not  a  tinkering-up 
of  the  present  school  system.  He  is  not  an 
^  *  educational  reformer ' '  making  something 
over.  He  has  plowed  up  the  educational 
ground.  He  actually  has  a  new  kind  of  a  school. 
It  is  not  a  ^^  school  of  unspecialized  vocational 


106         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

training,"  or  ^^a  school  founded  on  play,"  or 
an  ** efficiency  school,"  or  any  of  the  other  terms 
with  which  it  has  been  designated.  It  is  hard 
to  describe  because  it  defies  classification  in  the 
old  terms.  Nothing  is  more  delightful  about 
the  Gary  schools  than  the  absence  of  cant. 
Most  of  the  current  educational  problems,  the 
books  and  ideas  on  pedagogy,  educational  psy- 
chology, supervision,  administration,  teaching- 
methods,  classroom  management,  discipline,  etc., 
which  fill  the  attention  of  the  current  educa- 
tional world  are  here  as  if  they  were  not.  It 
is  a  school  built  up  outside  the  influence  of  the 
professors  of  education,  the  teachers'  colleges, 
and  the  normal  school  of  the  land.  It  is  true 
that  there  is  probably  not  a  single  idea  oper- 
ative that  is  original  with  Mr.  Wirt.  Probably 
there  is  not  a  single  idea  that  is  not  being  ap- 
plied in  some  school  in  the  country.  The  nov- 
elty is  the  synthesis,  and  the  democratic  spirit 
that  motivates  it. 

Here  is  provided  for  the  first  time  a  genuine 
public  school,  a  school  which  does  reflect  all  the 
healthy  interests  of  the  community,  and  where 
the  child  does  become  familiar  with  its  life  and 
with  his  own  interests  and  vocational  opportuni- 
ties   through   practical   doing    of   work.    The 


COMMUNITIES  FOE  CHILDREN      107 

school  becomes  ^'a  clearing-house  for  com- 
munity life."  To  enter  the  Emerson  or  Froe- 
bel  School  in  Gary — the  two  superb  new  build- 
ings constructed  by  Mr.  Wirt — is  like  coming 
into  a  well-ordered  city  where  each  citizen  is 
going  about  his  proper  business.  There  is  none 
of  that  slightly  depressing  atmosphere  of  the 
mild  if  excellent  prison  for  half-day  involuntary 
labor  which  is  too  often  the  ordinary  school. 
Classes  do  not  seem  to  be  neatly  immured  in 
rooms,  or  to  be  moving  about  in  lock-step.  You 
are  dealing  with  interested  individuals  who, 
singly  or  in  spontaneous  groups,  are  utilizing 
all  the  facilities  of  a  lavishly  equipped  and  stim- 
ulating community.  The  tone  is  of  a  glorified 
democratic  club,  where  members  avail  them- 
selves of  privileges  which  they  know  are  theirs. 
The  schools  are  public  in  the  same  broad  sense 
that  the  streets  and  parks  are  public.  The 
school  is  the  children's  institution.  They  un- 
affectedly own  it  and  use  it  as  a  mechanic  uses 
his  workshop  or  an  artist  his  studio.  To  go  to 
the  schools  in  the  evening  and  see  the  children 
running  and  playing  in  the  great  broad  halls — 
incomparable  playrooms — running  in  now  and 
then  to  speak  to  their  parents  who  are  studying 
in  the  evening  school,  is  to  get  a  new  emotional 


108         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

sense  of  what  a  school  may  be.  The  children  do 
not  seem  to  be  there  because  education  is  ^^com- 
pulsory," or  because  the  parents  send  them 
there  to  get  rid  of  them,  but  because  what  can 
be  done  there  is  so  interesting  that  they  cannot 
stay  away. 

I  am  unable  otherwise  to  account  for  their 
streaming  back  in  such  numbers  to  the  volun- 
tary Saturday  schools,  voluntary  for  the  teach- 
ers, too,  who  are  paid  extra  for  their  work. 
Saturday  is  a  glorified  pay-day,  where  one  may 
do  anything  one  likes,  from  making  swords  in 
the  wood-shop  to  studying  back  work  in  the 
classroom.  I  spent  a  fascinating  hour  watch- 
ing the  thronged  wood-shop  where  little  boys 
were  fussing  with  the  scraps  left  from  the  regu- 
lar work  of  the  week.  It  occurred  to  me  then 
how  little  real  difference  there  was  between  the 
well-to-do  home  and  the  very  poorest  in  the  way 
of  interesting  activities  for  children.  How 
many  homes  of  the  comfortably  enlightened 
classes  were  fit  places  to  bring  up  a  child? 
How  many  even  pretend  to  supply  the  books 
and  the  wood-work  and  tools  and  plants  and 
music  with  which  these  wonderful  buildings 
were  running  over?  Without  interesting  ac- 
tivities for  children,  city  homes,  both  rich  and 


COMMUNITIES  FOE  CHILDREN      109 

poor,  can  provide  only  schools  for  loafing.  As 
between  the  street,  to  which  the  less  well-to-do 
child  emerges  for  interest,  and  the  vaudeville, 
the  ^^ movie"  and  the  current  fads  to  which  the 
well-to-do  child  escapes,  I  think  the  street  is 
probably  the  less  demoralizing. 

This  Saturday  workshop  was  a  little  study  in 
spontaneous  discipline.  Although  the  children 
were  unwatched,  they  worked  on  their  own  little 
jobs  as  indefatigably  as  if  they  were  under  a 
drill-master.  If  any  little  boy  became  weary 
and  was  moved  to  interfere  with  another  little 
boy,  he  was  apt  to  be  brushed  off  as  though  he 
were  an  irritating  fly.  Could  it  be  that  mis- 
chievousness,  supposed  to  be  an  integral  part 
of  child-nature,  was  simply  a  product  of  re- 
pression or  idleness?  Could  it  be  that  school 
discipline  was  largely  an  attempt  to  solve  prob- 
lems which  artificial  rules  were  directly  manu- 
facturing? Visiting  superintendents,  appalled 
at  the  freedom  in  the  Gary  schools,  tip-toe  about 
looking  for  signs  of  depredation.  They  do  not 
seem  to  report  any.  I  decided  that  these 
schools  had  actually  acquired  the  ^'public" 
sense.  It  seemed  really  true  that  children,  un- 
less they  were  challenged  to  inventive  wicked- 
ness by  teachers'  rules  and  precepts,  were  no 


110         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

more  likely  to  spoil  their  school  than  a  lawyer 
is  likely  to  deface  the  panels  in  the  library  of 
his  club.  This  children's  community  seemed  to 
be  enjoying  its  busy  life  in  the  same  spirit  that 
the  wider  public  uses  its  streets  and  libraries 
and  museums  and  railroad  trains. 

This  supremely  democratic  public  sense  is  the 
motive  of  Mr.  Wirt's  genius.  All  this  richness 
of  opportunity — the  playgrounds,  gymnasia, 
swimming-pools,  gardens,  science  laboratories, 
work-shops,  libraries,  conservatories — which 
this  school  provides  so  lavishly,  is  possible  to 
the  public  of  a  small  and  relatively  poor  city  like 
Gary,  exactly  because  the  schools  are  managed 
like  any  other  public  service.  The  modern  edu- 
cational ideal,  ^'to  provide  a  desk  and  seat  for 
every  child,"  is  as  absurd  as  would  be  one  to 
provide  a  seat  in  the  park  for  every  inhabitant. 
No  public  service  is  used  by  more  than  a  frac- 
tion of  the  people  at  any  one  time.  Mr.  Wirt 
provides  the  coveted  ^^desk  and  seat''  for  about 
one-quarter  of  the  children.  While  they  are 
studying  the  traditional  three  E's,  etc.,  the  rest 
of  the  school  is  distributed  in  shop  and  play- 
grounds, gymnasium  and  studio,  or  at  home. 
By  an  ingenious  redistribution  of  the  groups 
throughout  the  course  of  an  eight-hour  day,  Mr. 


COMMUNITIES  FOE  CHILDREN      111 

Wirt  is  able  not  only  to  give  every  cMld  the 
opportunity  of  the  varied  facilities  every  day, 
but  he  is  able  to  accommodate  in  one  school 
building  twice  the  ordinary  number  of  children. 
The  insoluble  ^^ part-time"  problems  of  city 
schools  disappear.  The  Gary  school  has  two 
complete  schools,  each  with  its  set  of  teachers, 
functioning  together  in  the  same  building  all 
day  long.  In  the  lower  grades  the  child  spends 
two  hours  daily  in  the  classroom,  an  hour  in 
laboratory  or  shop,  half-an-hour  in  studio,  and 
half-an-hour  in  gymnasium,  an  hour  in  audi- 
torium, and  the  rest  of  the  day  in  study,  play 
or  outside  activity.  The  older  child  has  three 
hours  for  formal  instruction,  and  two  hours  for 
more  intensive  shop  or  studio  work.  Children 
are  passing  back  and  forth  constantly  between 
home  and  school,  each  with  his  or  her  own 
scheme  of  work,  and  all  the  school  is  being  used 
all  the  time. 

The  amount  of  money  thus  saved  in  school 
buildings  alone  is  so  large  that  even  a  town  like 
Gary,  with  relatively  meager  school  revenues, 
can  afford  not  only  the  varied  equipment,  but 
also  luxuries  like  special  school  physicians  and 
nurses,  and  special  teachers  for  special  sub- 
jects.   Mr.  Wirt  has  been  accused  of  ^^  business 


112         EDUCATION  AND  LIVINa 

efficiency,"  but  this  is  scarcely  the  term  for  so 
artistically  elegant  a  scheme  of  economy. 
When  you  reflect  that  it  is  just  because  the  tra- 
ditional classrooms  are  provided  for  only  a 
proportion  of  the  children  that  all  of  them  have 
the  varied  daily  opportunities  of  many-sided 
work  and  play,  you  are  likely  to  call  this  *  *  econ- 
omy,'^  in  the  old  golden  Greek  sense  of  the  wise 
management  of  household  resources,  so  that 
every  member  may  share  alike  in  the  activity 
and  the  wealth.  Such  economy  is  creative;  it 
enriches,  not  impoverishes.  I  have  said  that 
Mr.  Wirt  thought  in  terms  of  the  rural  com- 
munity, but  it  is  of  the  rural  community  and  its 
creative  economy,  expanded  to  fill  and  reor- 
ganize the  life  of  the  modern  city.  The  school 
trains  the  child  by  letting  him  do  the  things 
the  city  does.  His  education  is  an  acclimatiza- 
tion to  the  wider  social  life. 

A  truly  public  school  would  let  nothing  com- 
munal remain  alien  to  itself.  In  the  chemistry 
class  at  the  Emerson  School  I  actually  found  the 
children  helping  in  the  necessary  chemical  work 
for  the  city.  The  class  was  simply  an  extension 
of  the  municipal  laboratory.  Gary,  of  course, 
has  the  good  fortune  or  the  good  sense  to  have 
as   chemistry  teacher  the  municipal  chemist. 


COMMUNITIES  FOR  CHILDREN      113 

The  older  children  act  as  his  assistants.  With 
him  the  class  tests  the  city  water,  the  various 
milk  supplies  of  the  town.  Under  the  inspector, 
they  visit  dairies,  workshops,  bakeries  and  food- 
stores.  Last  year  they  published  a  milk  bulle- 
tin containing  general  information  and  reports 
of  their  tests.  I  could  not  see  that  it  was  es- 
sentially inferior  in  quality  to  one  that  an  agri- 
cultural school  might  have  issued.  When  I 
came  upon  this  class  it  was  testing  sugars  and 
candies,  from  the  different  shops  of  the  town, 
for  purity  and  for  use  of  coloring  matter.  An- 
other class  was  experimenting  with  soft  drinks, 
studying  questions  of  solution,  suspension  and 
crystallization,  with  ramifications,  I  was  told, 
towards  the  physiological  effect  of  certain  pro- 
ducts. The  children  were  practically  deputy 
food  inspectors,  and  made  reports  on  the  official 
blanks.  The  chemist  assured  me  that  he  had 
not  lost  a  case  in  prosecuting  for  violation  of 
the  pure  food  laws.  In  East  Chicago,  where 
school-children  were  ostensibly  not  trained  as 
a  vigilance  committee  in  scientific  investiga- 
tions, the  chemist  could  not  get  a  single  con- 
viction. 

The  children  also  test  the  materials  supplied 
to  the   school,  the  coal,  cement,  etc.,   to  see 


114         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

whether  they  come  up  to  specifications.  I  saw 
a  group  trying  to  make  soap  for  the  use  of  the 
school.  The  chemist  assured  me — college- 
trained  ignoramus  that  I  was  amidst  this  youth- 
ful expertness — ^that  there  was  scarcely  a  prin- 
ciple of  the  science,  theoretical  or  practical,  that 
he  could  not  develop  from  this  work,  all  so  di- 
rectly motivated  by  the  daily  life  around  the 
children.  I  wish  I  could  convey  the  fine  cali- 
ber of  this  young  chemist  as  he  stood  in  his 
laboratory  with  the  children  working  around 
him,  his  clear  poise  between  the  theoretical  and 
the  practical  making  him  for  me  the  ideal  sym- 
bol of  science  working  ceaselessly  at  the  world 
around  to  make  it  cleaner  and  healthier  and 
more  livable. 

That  chemistry  class  in  Grary  has  a  high  and 
momentous  significance  to  me.  It  was  dis- 
tinctly not  play,  as  all  other  laboratory  work  in 
school  or  college  that  I  have  seen  has  been 
play.  I  was  surprised  to  find  how  completely 
the  doing  of  real  work  banished  the  amateur 
atmosphere  and  at  the  same  time  made  the  work 
infinitely  more  interesting.  Mr.  Wirt  says  the 
child  is  a  natural  scientist,  indefatigably  curious 
and  resourceful,  quick  and  accurate.  The  little 
children  actually  seem  to  achieve  less  breakage 


COMMUNITIES  FOR  CHILDREN     115 

than  the  older.  What  kind  of  a  commnnity  we 
are  going  to  have  when  any  large  proportion 
of  the  children  grow  up  to  observe  and  test  the 
physical  conditions  under  which  they  live — 
when  they  get  the  scientific-deputy-inspector 
habit,  so  to  say — and  what  would  happen  to 
some  forms  of  political  jugglery  if  a  younger 
generation  got  used  to  thinking  in  terms  of 
qualitative  and  quantitative  tests,  I  leave  to  the 
imagination.  But  it  seemed  to  me  that  that 
chemistry  class  was  one  of  the  most  important 
activities  in  the  United  States  to-day. 


XV 

EEALLY   PUBLIC   SCHOOLS 

CHAEACTEEISTIC  of  the  ^^public  sense'' 
of  the  Gary  schools  is  the  class  in  history 
and  geography,  which  I  found  at  work  getting 
an  imaginative  background  of  the  larger  social 
world.  To  the  news-board  in  the  hall  they 
brought  clippings  that  seemed  important.  The 
history  room  was  smothered  in  maps  and  charts, 
most  of  them  made  by  the  children  themselves. 
There  was  a  great  red  Indiana  ballot,  a  chart  of 
the  State  Senate,  a  diagram  of  State  admini- 
stration, a  table  showing  the  evolution  of  Ameri- 
can political  parties,  war-maps  and  pictures. 
The  place  was  a  workshop,  with  broad  tables 
for  map  drawings,  and  a  fine  spread  of  maga- 
zines and  papers.  ** Laboratory''  work  in  his- 
tory, tried  so  timorously  in  some  of  our  most 
daring  colleges,  was  in  full  swing  in  a  Gary  high 
school  class. 

When  I  visited  the  room  the  class  was  con- 
cerning itself  with  reports  on  ^^The  city  as  a 

116 


EEALLY  PUBLIC  SCHOOLS        117 

healthful  place  to  live  in,''  with  special  em- 
phasis on  parks,  because  the  town  had  been  wag- 
ing its  campaign  for  the  new  water-front  park. 
Little  outlines  on  Greek  and  Eoman  cities, 
medieval  and  modern  cities,  had  been  worked 
up  in  the  school  library — ^bountifully  equipped 
as  a  branch  of  the  city  public  library.  I  had 
walked  into  a  true  course  on  town-planning, 
at  once  the  most  fascinating  and  significant  of 
current  social  interests  and  the  study  that  packs 
into  itself  more  historical,  sociological  and  geo- 
graphical stimulation  than  almost  any  I  know. 
A  class  that  had  gone  through  those  reports 
would  have  the  materials  for  exactly  the  social 
background  that  our  current  imaginations  need ; 
and,  moreover,  all  those  materials  would  be 
firmly  placed  in  the  community  setting. 

There  is  a  charming  communal  self-conscious- 
ness about  Gary,  and  this  sort  of  history  is  the 
thing  that  feeds  it.  One  class  had  been  working 
on  a  comparison  of  Athenian  and  Spartan  edu- 
cation with  Gary  education.  This  struck  me  as 
peculiarly  delightful.  Such  social  introspec- 
tion we  rather  badly  lack  in  America,  yet  it  is 
the  only  soil  in  which  intellectual  virtue  can 
ever  grow.  The  ancient  history  class  has  for 
its  purpose :  **to  improve  its  members  as  Ameri- 


118         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

can  citizens  by  a  study  of  the  experiences  of  the 
ancient  peoples."  This  class,  after  some  class- 
room turbulence,  formed  a  voluntary  society 
which  is  duly  opened  and  conducted  by  the 
president,  while  the  instructor  lingers  in  a 
leisurely  fashion  outside.  I  know  of  no  more 
admirable  reason  for  historical  study  than  this 
phrase,  the  natural  expression  of  the  Gary  child 
who  wrote  the  constitution  for  this  class. 

They  do  not  seem  to  know  whether  they  are 
studying  *^ Civics''  or  not.  They  are  too  busy 
soaking  in  from  real  events  a  familiarity  with 
history  as  it  is  lived  and  the  community  as  it 
works.  I  throw  in  here  an  advertisement  for 
the  ^^ Literary  Digest"  and  the  ^^Independent," 
which  the  pupils  regularly  read.  They  study 
history  backward,  so  that  it  explains  what  is 
happening  to-day.  They  repeatedly  dramatize 
remote  times.  They  are  talking  of  cooperating 
with  the  State  historical  pageant.  It  seemed  to 
me  that  these  children  were  actually  learning 
their  social  world  in  the  spontaneous  natural 
way  that  the  intelligent  child  learns  it  from 
newspapers  and  books  and  from  the  slow,  un- 
conscious widening  of  horizon  for  which  he  must 
usually  look  quite  outside  the  school. 

If  other  community  institutions  have  anything 


EEALLY  PUBLIC  SCHOOLS        119 

educational  to  offer  outside  the  school,  or  if 
parents  and  children  think  they  have,  Mr. 
Wirt's  school  lets  the  children  go  to  these  out 
of  their  auditorium  or  play  hour.  The  churches 
may  have  them  for  religious  instruction — there 
is  no  Bible-reading  or  prayer  in  the  Gary 
schools — and  thus  avoid  the  imagined  necessity 
for  a  special  kind  of  church  day-school.  Al- 
ready a  Polish  parochial  school  in  Gary  has 
lost  its  reason  for  being  and  vanished.  Y.  M. 
C.  A's,  neighborhood  houses,  special  music- 
teachers,  etc.,  may  also  act  as  extensipns  of  the 
school.  It  will  be  interesting  to  sedljiow  suc- 
cessfully some  of  these  institutions  which  pur- 
port to  form  the  child's  morals  and  care  for  his 
soul's  destiny  prove  their  supplementary  value, 
and  how  far  they  are  not  simply  having  joy- 
fully extended  to  them  a  long  rope  by  which 
they  may  hang  themselves. 

To  Mr.  Wirt  the  school  is  not  more  a  com- 
munity than  the  community  is  a  school.  He 
believes  that  parks  and  playgrounds  should  fol- 
low the  schools,  and  in  Gary  he  demands  twenty 
acres  for  every  school  plant.  He  does  not  rely 
upon  public  playgrounds,  to  which,  as  experi- 
ence shows,  only  a  proportion  of  children  can 
be  enticed  from  the  streets,  but  his  playground 


120         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

is  a  part  of  the  school  on  equal  terms  with  the 
other  activities.  Otherwise  these  very  expen- 
sive grounds  which  cities  are  providing  are 
apt  to  be  futile.  Mr.  Wirt's  policy  is  to  make 
it  as  easy  as  possible  for  the  community  to  use 
the  schools.  He  does  not  force  people  to  the  op- 
portunities, but  he  puts  them  where  the  people 
cannot  easily  evade  them.  He  does  not  drive 
children  to  the  public  library,  but  he  has  a 
branch  put  in  each  school.  The  Gary  schools 
are  open  night  and  day,  practically  every  day 
in  the  year.  The  Indiana  law — ^protector  from 
tyranny — forbids  more  than  ten  months  of 
school  a  year,  but  allows  vacation  schools. 
Sunday  sees  popular  lectures.  The  Gary 
schools  seem  almost  as  public  as  the  streets. 

If  the  school  is  to  be  not  only  a  community 
embryonic  of  current  society  but  also  a  school- 
community  of  itself,  it  must  have  some  forum 
or  theater  where  everything  that  is  peculiarly 
interesting  in  any  part  of  the  school  may  be 
brought  dramatically  to  the  attention  of  the 
rest  of  the  school.  This  Mr.  Wirt  provides  in 
the  auditorium  hour,  so  drearily  used  in  the  or- 
dinary school  for  religious  exercises,  ^*  speaking 
pieces,"  and  moral  homilies.  In  Gary  every 
child  goes  to  ^^ auditorium"  for  an  hour  each 


EEALLY  PUBLIC  SCHOOLS       121 

day,  but  he  listens  there  to  talks  by  the  special 
teachers  about  their  work,  lantern-lectures  and 
dramatic  dialogues  written  by  the  children 
themselves  from  their  history  or  literature 
work.  There  may  be  moving-pictures,  instru- 
mental music,  gymnastic  exhibitions.  The  in- 
itiative and  responsibility  are  left  to  the  teach- 
ers. There  seems  to  be  no  limit  to  the  interest 
and  the  possibility  of  what  may  go  on  in  this 
free  little  secular  theater  except  what  the  imagi- 
nation of  teachers  and  children  can  suggest. 
There  is  always  singing,  and  of  a  most  excellent 
tone.  ** Auditorium '^  is  one  of  Mr.  Wirt's 
novel  ideas.  It  seems  to  make  unreal  the  old 
categories  of  *^ entertainment"  and  ^^edifica- 
tion,'' just  as  the  rest  of  the  school  seems  to 
damage  the  conceptions  of  ^^work"  and  ^^play." 
There  was  a  pleasant  informality  about  things, 
with  the  girls  sewing  at  the  back  of  the  theater, 
and  the  young  audience  breaking  into  whistling 
as  they  marched  out  to  the  music  of  the  piano. 
*' Auditorium"  ought  to  be  quite  as  important 
as  Mr.  Wirt  thinks  it  is.  What  school-work 
might  become,  lived  always  in  the  possible  light 
of  its  intelligent  presentation  to  the  school  audi- 
ence in  dramatic  form,  we  do  not  know,  because 
educators  have  never  been  dramatists.    The 


122         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

Gary  schools  have  special  teachers  for  expres- 
sion, but  the  American  spirit  is  in  many  ways 
so  inexpressive  that  the  idea  can  thus  far  be 
only  a  frank  and  delightful  experiment. 

I  liked  particularly  in  the  '^auditoriums"  I 
visited  the  intermingling  of  children  of  all  ages. 
This  is  one  of  the  many  ways  by  which  the 
Gary  school  breaks  down  the  snobbery  of  age 
which  causes  so  much  unhappiness  in  childhood, 
and  fixes  the  adult  mind  with  so  many  delusions. 
I  came  across  a  significant  editorial  in  the 
Emerson  School  paper  which  showed  me  how 
useful  this  intermingling  was  in  smashing  caste 
lines  that  were  already  forming.  The  editor 
acknowledged  that  the  expected  objectionable- 
ness  of  the  ^'youngsters"  had  not  asserted  it- 
self. One  got  a  real  sense  of  a  new  sympathy 
breaking  upon  these  already  sophisticating 
minds  of  high-school  children. 

I  mention  this  because  it  is  typical  of  Mr. 
Wirt's  genius  to  obliterate  artificial  lines  and 
avoid  mechanical  groupings.  His  ideal  school 
is  one  like  the  Emerson  in  Gary,  a  complete 
school,  from  kindergarten  to  college,  in  the  same 
building,  with  all  the  varied  facilities  used  by 
all  classes.  The  grading  is  of  the  utmost  flexi- 
bility.   The  traditional  twelve  grades  are  fol- 


REALLY  PUBLIC  SCHOOLS        123 

lowed,  but  classes  work  in  *^ rapid,"  ^^ average," 
or  *^slow"  groups,  according  as  the  various 
children  give  promise  of  completing  the  State- 
prescribed  curriculum  in  ten,  twelve  or  four- 
teen years.  The  child  may  pass  from  group  to 
group  or  from  grade  to  grade  at  any  time  on 
the  examination  of  the  supervisor  of  instruction. 
The  child  himself  has  no  sense  of  being 
*^ graded"  or  even  ** marked."  Eeport-cards 
are  rather  a  concession  to  parents'  weaknesses. 
If  the  child  needs  additional  help,  there  is  the 
parallel  school,  so  that  he  may  have  a  double 
lesson  the  same  day.  And  the  Saturday  school 
offers  another  opportunity. 

All  studying  is  supposed  to  be  done  in  school 
hours.  The  fearful  bogey  of  ^^ home-work"  is 
laid.  In  this  free  interchange  of  groups  the 
child  acquires  a  sense  of  individuality.  Each 
has  practically  an  individual  schedule  of  work, 
for  the  organization  of  which  the  executive 
principal,  who  devotes  all  his  time  to  such  mat- 
ters, is  responsible.  Except  in  the  youngest 
classes,  the  children  seem  to  move  about  indi- 
vidually to  their  different  rooms  and  shops. 
By  this  drastic  carrying  down  of  college 
methods  through  the  grades  Mr.  Wirt  has  ex- 
ploded another  hoary  superstition  that  great 


124         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

masses  of  children  in  city  schools  can  only  be 
handled  by  uniform  and  machine  methods,  in  a 
lump.  Froebel  School  in  Gary  has  twenty-five 
hundred  children,  most  of  them  very  small  alien 
immigrants.  Yet  the  same  flexible  and  free 
methods  are  used  there,  apparently  with  suc- 
cess. These  children,  because  of  the  immensely 
varied  equipment,  and  the  possibility  of  small 
classes  in  the  shops,  are  getting  something  re- 
sembling individual  instruction.  I  picked  up  at 
random  the  card  of  an  older  girl  at  Emerson. 
It  read:  *^  Printing,  History,  Gymnasium, 
French,  Music,  Botany,  Auditorium,  English." 
The  very  shock  of  that  bold  ^'Printing"  gives 
you  a  realization  of  the  modern  school  you  are 
in.    And  this  is  a  girl  besides. 

Now  a  program  like  this,  and  all  this  free  elec- 
tion and  flexibility,  would  seem  wilful  and  an- 
archical were  it  not  for  the  fact  that  in  the 
Gary  school  these  schedules  are  the  result  of  a 
natural  and  very  careful  process  of  selection, 
made  by  the  child.  What  the  child  shall  study, 
outside  of  the  regular  classroom  work,  is 
neither  forced  upon  it  nor  aimlessly  selected. 
Take  the  Emerson  School,  a  beautiful  building 
with  laboratories  and  studios,  gymnasia  and 
shops,  and  put  your  child  into  its  kindergarten 


EEALLY  PUBLIC  SCHOOLS        125 

or  first  grade.  He  runs  about  the  halls.  The 
shops  and  studies  and  laboratories  are  not  seg- 
regated, but  distributed  over  the  building  so  as 
to  convey  the  impression  that  they  are  equally 
significant,  and  to  give  every  child  an  opportu- 
nity of  becoming  familiar  with  them.  All  the 
rooms  have  big  glass  doors  or  windows.  The 
child's  own  unaided  curiosity  makes  him  look 
in  and  wonder  about  what  the  older  children 
are  doing  there.  One  could  see  children  of  all 
ages  peering  into  the  foundry  or  machine-shop 
or  printery. 

When  the  child  has  reached  the  third  or 
fourth  grade  he  has  a  certain  idea  of  what  ac- 
tivity interests  him,  and  he  is  allowed  to  go 
into  shop  or  laboratory  as  observer  or  helper 
to  the  older  child.  He  watches  and  asks  ques- 
tions, and  the  older  boy  learns  by  teaching  him. 
If  the  child  finds  that  the  work  does  not  actually 
interest  him  he  still  has  the  chance  to  change. 
When  he  takes  up  the  work  in  the  higher  grades 
he  has  served  his  apprenticeship  and  is  already 
familiar  with  the  apparatus  and  the  technique. 
The  teacher  does  not  have  to  break  in  a  new 
class  each  year.  It  is  almost  a  self-perpetu- 
ating and  self -instructing  class.  The  child  has 
been  assimilated  to  the  work  as  new  members 


126         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

in  any  profession  or  trade  in  society  are  as- 
similated. When  the  child  is  exposed  from  his 
earliest  years  to  the  various  vocational  activi- 
ties, is  allowed  to  come  into  them  just  as  his 
curiosity  ripens,  you  have  as  perfect  a  ^^  choice 
of  a  vocation"  as  could  be  imagined.  Only  this 
sort  of  opportunity  can  really  be  called  '^voca- 
tional training.''  The  usual  vocation  school 
work  takes  the  child  too  late,  when  his  curiosity 
is  likely  to  be  dulled ;  it  puts  him  into  the  work 
without  any  previous  familiarity.  It  can 
scarcely  be  anything  but  drudgery.  If  '^  capa- 
cities are  to  be  developed,"  Mr.  Wirt's  scheme 
gives  the  surest  means  of  developing  them.  It 
solves  the  grave  problems  of  '* vocational"  and 
^^pre-vocational"  training,  which  are  so  sorely 
vexing  the  professional  educational  world,  a 
large  part  of  whose  business  in  life  seems  to  be 
to  create  and  have  problems. 


XVI 

APPRENTICES   TO   THE   SCHOOL 

VOCATIONAL  training  in  the  schools  of 
Gary  means  that  whatever  work  is  nec- 
essary in  the  way  of  repairing,  conserving, 
bealitifying  or  enhancing  the  facilities,  is  done 
by  the  school  itself.  These  large,  lavishly 
equipped  modern  school-bnildings  require  a 
force  of  mechanics  to  keep  them  in  repair. 
Their  shops  are  the  industrial  and  manual  shops 
for  the  school.  The  children  work  in  them  with 
skilled  union  workmen,  who  are  employed  not 
primarily  as  ^'manual  training"  teachers,  but 
as  assistants  to  the  building  superintendent. 
The  mechanics  teach  by  allowing  the  children 
to  help  them  as  apprentices.  They  earn  their 
salaries  by  repair  and  construction  work,  while 
the  children  who  desire  it  get  an  incomparable 
vocational  training  at  practically  no  cost  to  the 
town.  Where  the  ordinary  trade-school  must 
have  large  classes  to  make  the  enterprise  pay, 
the  Gary  vocational  work  may  be  done  with  the 

127 


128         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

smallest  groups,  for  the  shops  are  paying  for 
themselves  anyway. 

Manual  training  takes  on  quite  a  new  mean- 
ing as  you  move  about,  watching  the  boys  in  the 
carpenter-shop  making  desks  or  tables,  or  cabi- 
nets for  the  botany  collections,  or  book-racks 
for  the  library,  sending  them  on  to  the  paint- 
shop  when  they  have  finished ;  boys  in  the  sheet- 
metal  shop  hammering  zinc  for  the  roof ;  young 
electricians  repairing  bells ;  a  couple  of  plumb- 
ers tinkering  with  pipes ;  little  groups  of  serious 
and  absorbedly  interested  boys  in  foundry  and 
forge  and  pattern-making  shop,  all  cooperating 
like  the  parts  of  a  well-ordered  factory.  There 
was  obviously  enough  real  work  to  keep  busy 
for  his  hour  a  day  every  child  who  desired 
training  in  a  trade.  Where  school  and  work- 
shop are  thus  fused,  the  need  for  ^' continua- 
tion" and  '^ cooperative"  courses — ^where  the 
boy  alternates  between  shop  or  factory  and 
school — disappears.  The  child  has  the  advan- 
tages of  both. 

The  ordinary  school,  and  even  the  specialized 
vocational  school,  is  rarely  doing  more  in  its 
industrial,  manual,  or  domestic  science  work 
than  playing  a  rather  dreary  game  with  toys. 
There  could  scarcely  be  a  greater  contrast  be- 


APPRENTICES  TO  THE  SCHOOL     129 

tween  the  real  shops  of  the  Gary  schools  and 
those  ordinary  ^^ shops"  and  kitchens  with  their 
dozens  of  little  machines  at  which  at  a  given 
time  the  entire  class  does  its  little  stereotyped 
^* stunt."  In  Gary  the  domestic  science  room 
is  a  real  kitchen  in  which  the  daily  luncheon 
is  prepared  and  served  at  cost  to  the  teachers 
and  pupils  who  desire  it.  The  cook  is  a  real 
cook,  and  the  girls  come  in  as  observers,  help- 
ers or  workers,  just  as  the  boys  go  into  the 
shops.  The  nearest  approach  to  a  luxury  is 
the  pottery  shop,  but  this  is  itself  perhaps  the 
best  symbol  of  that  fusion  of  the  artistic  and 
the  practical  that  is  the  Wirt  genius.  What 
are  you  to  say  when  you  walk  into  the  art  studio 
and  find  a  dozen  girls  and  boys  high  on  a  scaf- 
folding painting  a  frieze  which  they  have  them-- 
selves  designed,  while  others  are  at  work  on 
stained-glass  designs  to  go  in  varnished  paper 
on  the  panels  of  the  door? 

There  is  a  genial,  joyous  quality  about  all  the 
work  that  gives  every  room  a  charm — the  foun- 
dry with  its  deep  shadows,  the  smooth  gray 
pottery  shop  with  its  turning  wheels  and  bright 
glazed  jugs,  the  botany  room  with  its  mass  of 
greenery.  Even  the  history  room  at  Emerson 
School  had  the  atmosphere  which  comes  from 


130         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

concentrated  interest  and  the  slow  accretion  of 
significant  material.  Emerson  itself  is  a  spa- 
cious and  dignified  building  with  innumerable 
little  touches  of  taste  that  one  usually  associ- 
ates only  with  the  high  schools  of  exceptionally 
wealthy  and  cultivated  suburban  communities. 
It  is  a  delightful  paradox  that  so  beautiful  a  life 
should  appear  to  be  lived  where  every  activity 
seems  to  be  motivated  by  direct  utilitarian  ap- 
plication. I  said  that  you  have  to  plow  your 
mind  up  to  understand  this  kind  of  a  school. 
Certainly  I  have  never  seen  a  place  which  more 
nearly  permitted  to  seem  real  that  old  ideal  of 
the  joy  of  work  which  we  imagine  must  have 
existed  back  in  guild  days.  It  may  be  left  to 
the  imagination  what  children  trained  in  such 
a  school  are  likely  to  have  to  say  to  the  indus- 
trial society  in  which  we  live. 

The  practical  work  of  the  school  is  only  lim- 
ited by  local  school  needs,  but  the  shoeless  con- 
dition of  some  of  the  Frcebel  children  inspired 
the  starting  of  a  shoe  shop  where  old  shoes  were 
made  over.  Both  Emerson  and  Frcebel  have  a 
printery  from  which  come  all  the  blanks,  re- 
ports, programs,  etc.,  used  in  the  school,  as  well 
as  the  bulletins  and  papers  by  which  the  various 
classes  are  tempted  to  preserve  the  good  things 


APPRENTICES  TO  THE  SCHOOL     131 

they  write.  The  commercial  pupils  have  charge 
of  all  the  accounting  and  bookkeeping  as  well 
as  the  supplies.  The  children  who  work  in  the 
shops  are  paid  in  checks,  which  are  calculated 
on  the  basis  of  prevailing  union  wages  for  the 
working-time.  This  provides  opportunities  for 
a  banking  system,  which  is  also  in  charge  of  the 
commercial  class.  In  the  Jefferson  School  the 
boiler-room  is  an  integral  part  of  the  machine- 
shop. 

The  botany  class  was  responsible  for  the 
beautiful  and  elaborate  conservatory  at  the  en- 
trance of  the  Emerson  School,  and  for  the  win- 
dow hothouse  in  the  botany  room,  where  prac- 
tical experiments  are  made.  The  botanists  also 
have  charge  of  the  shrubs  and  trees  on  the 
grounds,  and  the  vegetable  gardens  which  they 
work  communistically  all  through  the  summer. 
Their  study  of  food  and  textile  products  rami- 
fied into  the  domestic  science  work,  just  as  the 
zoology  study  was  fused  with  physiology.  This 
latter  class  had  a  playground  zoo,  with  foxes 
and  coyotes,  raccoons  and  prairie-dogs,  about 
whose  habits  and  adventures  they  were  prepar- 
ing a  brochure,  which  was  already  in  press  at 
the  printery.  When  I  stepped  into  the  zoology 
laboratory  itself,  I  found  that  I  was  in  an  even 


132         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

more  animated  zoo.  Crows,  chickens  and 
pigeons  in  cages  at  the  back  of  the  room  were 
lusty  with  vociferous  greeting.  The  imper- 
turbability of  the  children  amidst  this  racket 
showed  me  how  well  aware  they  were  that  this 
was  the  way  a  zoology  room  ought  to  behave. 

Such  a  school,  where  the  child  works  almost 
unconsciously  into  a  vocation  which  appeals 
to  him  as  neither  play  nor  drudgery,  is  far  more 
^^ vocational"  than  even  the  specialized  school. 
The  child,  beginning  so  young  in  shop  or  labora- 
tory, and  assimilating  the  work  very  gradually, 
is  able  to  lay  deep  foundations  of  interest  and 
skill.  The  Gary  school  is  distinctly  unspe- 
cialized.  In  a  sense  it  gives  a  completely  '^lib- 
eral education."  The  child  emerges  a  skilful 
amateur.  The  industrial  and  scientific  work  no 
more  ^* train"  him  to  take  a  definite  place  in  the 
industrial  world  than  the  cultural  work  trains 
him  to  be  a  college  professor.  But  he  should 
leave  school  well  equipped  to  cope  with  a 
dynamic,  rapidly  changing  industrial  society 
which  demands  above  all  things  versatility,  and 
which  scraps  methods  and  machines  as  ruth- 
lessly as  it  does  men.  Only  the  man  of  rounded 
training  and  resourcefulness  who  can  turn  his 
hand  quickly  to  a  variety  of  occupations  has 


APPRENTICES  TO  THE  SCHOOL     133 

much  chance  of  success.  Our  public  school,  in 
spite  of  its  fancied  ^  liberal '^  curriculum,  has 
really  been  turning  out  only  very  low-grade 
specialists.  It  has  made  no  effort  to  produce 
the  type  of  mind  most  needed  to-day — ^the  ver- 
satile machinist,  the  practical  engineer,  the 
mind  that  adapts  and  masters  mechanism. 
This  is  probably  the  best  intellectual  type  our  y 
society  produces.  This  exactness,  resourceful- 
ness, inventiveness,  pragmatic  judgment  of  a 
mechanism  by  its  product,  the  sense  of  ma- 
chinery as  a  means,  not  an  end,  are  exactly  the 
qualities  that  society  demands  in  every  profes- 
sion or  trade. 

The  Gary  school  is  the  first  I  havQ  seen  that  \ 
promises  to  cultivate  this  kind  of  intelligence./ 
It  frankly  accepts  the  machine  not  in  the  usual 
sense  of  the  vocational  schools,  as  an  exacting 
master  that  the  child  is  to  learn  docilely  to  obey, 
but  as  the  basis  of  our  modern  life,  by  whose 
means  we  must  make  whatever  progress  we  may 
will.  The  machine  seems  to  be  a  thing  to  which 
society  is  irrevocably  pledged.  It  is  time  the 
school  recognized  it.  In  Gary  it  is  with  the 
child  from  his  earliest  years.  It  is  the  motive 
of  his  scientific  study.  The  physics  teacher  at 
the  Emerson  School  told  me  that  he  thought  the 


134         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

fascinating  and  irresponsible  automobile  had 
done  more  to  educate  the  younger  generation 
than  most  of  the  public  schools.  Tinkering 
with  an  automobile  was  a  whole  scientific  train- 
ing. 

I  dropped  into  his  physics  class,  and  found  a 
dozen  twelve-year-old  girls  and  their  nine-year- 
old  ^^ helpers"  studying  the  motor-cycle.  With 
that  fine  disregard  for  boundaries  which  char- 
acterizes Gary  education,  the  hour  began  with 
a  spelling  lesson  of  the  names  of  the  parts  and 
processes  of  the  machine.  After  the  words 
were  learned,  the  mechanism  was  explained  to 
them  as  they  pored  over  it,  and  their  memory 
of  vaporization,  evaporation,  etc.,  called  into 
play.  The  motor-cycle  was  set  going,  the  girls 
described  its  action,  and  the  lesson  was  over, 
as  perfect  a  piece  of  teaching  as  I  have  ever 
heard.  The  intense  animation  of  that  little 
group  was  all  the  more  piquant  for  having  as 
a  background  the  astounded  disapprobation  of 
three  grave  school  superintendents  from  the 
East. 

To  these  physics  classes  the  ventilating,  heat- 
ing and  electric  systems  in  the  schools  are  all 
text-books.  The  climate  is  studied.  The  shops 
provide  many  physics  problems.    There  was  a 


APPRENTICES  TO  THE  SCHOOL     135 

class  of  boys  having  explained  to  them  the  phys- 
ical principles  of  various  types  of  machines. 
The  impetuous  rush  of  those  little  boys  as  they 
were  sent  into  the  machine-shop  to  take  apart 
a  lawn-mower,  a  bicycle,  and  a  cream-separator, 
and  the  look  of  elation  on  their  faces,  would 
alone  make  Gary  unforgettable  to  me.  It  was 
evident  that  this  was  indeed  a  different  kind  of 
school. 


XVII 

THE    NATUBAL   SCHOOL 

ASUEPEISINGLY  small  amount  of  ad- 
ministrative machinery  for  so  varied  a 
system  is  required  by  the  schools  of  Gary.  Mr. 
Wirt  is  the  City  Superintendent  of  Schools. 
Under  him  each  of  the  five  school  buildings  has 
an  executive  principal.  Two  supervisors  of 
instruction  look  after  the  pedagogical  work  of 
the  system.  The  director  of  industrial  work 
has  charge  of  building  repair,  and  supervises 
the  shops  where  the  children  work  under  the 
mechanic-teachers.  There  is  no  attempt  to  seg- 
regate the  vocational  work.  Manual,  physical, 
artistic  and  academic  activities  are  admin- 
istered on  an  equal  footing. 

For  the  teacher  the  Gary  school  should  be  al- 
most as  liberating  as  it  is  to  the  pupil.  In  the 
details  of  courses  much  initiative  is  left  to  the 
teacher.  It  is  really  an  inductive  school  where 
courses  are  worked  out  by  supervisors  consult- 
ing together  on  the  basis  of  classroom  experi- 

13G 


THE  NATURAL  SCHOOL  137 

ence.  Teachers  are  encouraged  to  experiment 
and  develop  their  own  ideas.  Here  is  the  first 
public  school  I  have  ever  seen  that  resolutely 
sets  itself  against  uniformity  of  method  or  pro- 
duct, that  recognizes  differences  of  individu- 
ality. 

The  working-day  of  the  teacher  may  be 
longer,  but  she  is  relieved  of  the  burdensome 
home-work.  The  nervous  strain  is  lessened  also 
by  the  freer  method  of  discipline.  There  can- 
not be  unruly  children  unless  children  are  ruled, 
and  in  the  Gary  school  there  is  apparently  no 
artificial  repression.  One  found  in  the  class- 
room as  much  talking  as  there  would  be  in  a 
concert  audience,  with  the  same  natural  motives, 
freed  of  ^^ rules  of  order,"  for  quiet.  The  fre- 
quent change  of  room  and  activity  in  the  Gary 
school  prevents,  too,  that  nervous  restiveness 
which  must  inevitably  come  to  the  child  kept 
long  at  his  desk.  The  point  is  that  only  in  a 
free  and  varied  school  like  this  can  one  talk  of 
effective  discipline.  When  school  activities  are 
as  attractive  as  they  are  here,  deprivation  be- 
comes punishment.  There  is  at  hand  an  instru- 
ment for  inculcating  reason  into  refractoriness 
which  is  as  powerful  as  the  stoutest  disciplina- 
rian could  wish.    The  ordinary  school  tries  to 


138         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

keep  up  a  military  system  of  control,  without 
any  means,  now  that  corporal  punishment  is 
generally  abolished,  of  punishing  infractions. 
In  a  Gary  school  ^^ being  sent  home"  for  mis- 
behavior usually  means  being  sent  to  a  place 
infinitely  less  interesting.  But  there  is  little 
talk  about  ^'mischievous  and  unruly  boys." 
Those  children  who,  in  spite  of  everything,  ''are 
not  adapted  to  our  kind  of  school,"  may  go  to 
the  school  farm  in  the  country  to  work.  But 
this  farm  is  not  in  any  sense  a  "reform"  school. 
Delicate  children  may  also  be  sent  there,  and 
other  classes  go  for  a  holiday.  As  to  the  per- 
sonal manners  prevailing  in  such  a  free  school 
as  this,  with  its  absence  of  moral  homily,  and 
effort  to  "train  character"  through  obedience 
and  discipline,  I  can  only  repeat  the  words  of  an 
Italian  boy  who  had  recently  come  from  ortho- 
dox schools  elsewhere:  "But  they're  so  po- 
lite!" 

I  was  glad  to  see  that  there  was  no  nonsense 
at  Gary  about  schemes  of  "self-government," 
which  can  be  little  more  than  a  humiliating  pre- 
tension in  any  school.  A  kindly  judge  did  once 
institute  "Boyville"  in  a  Gary  school,  with  a 
parody  of  municipal  functions,  but  its  unreality 
soon  relegated  it  to  limbo.    Spontaneous  or- 


THE  NATURAL  SCHOOL  139 

ganization  there  is,  but  it  grows  out  of  real 
work.  The  boys '  ninth  grade  English  class,  for 
instance,  has  organized  itself  as  the  Emerson 
Improvement  Association,  and  its  work  re- 
volves around  the  speaking  and  writing  neces- 
sary in  conducting  the  affairs  of  the  organiza- 
tion. There  seem  to  be  no  ^^extra-curricular*' 
activities,  which  create  so  many  problems  else- 
where. Athletic  teams  and  sports  are  con- 
nected with  the  gymnasium  work.  Other  socie- 
ties spring  up  naturally  out  of  the  school  inter- 
ests. Problems  of  ^* fraternities*'  and  the 
control  of  athletics  which  confront  so  many 
high  schools  are  thus  naturally  avoided. 

The  Gary  school  not  only  lightens  this  strain 
of  discipline  for  the  teacher  and  cultivates  her 
initiative,  but  serves  as  a  kind  of  training- 
school  for  the  teachers  themselves.  The  new- 
coming  teacher  learns  by  acting  as  helper  or 
^^ apprentice"  to  the  older  teacher,  just  as  the 
children  in  shop  or  laboratory  learn  from  one 
another.  The  result  is  an  uncommon  and  ap- 
pealing equality  between  teachers  and  children, 
without  imposed  authority  on  one  side  or  sub- 
servience on  the  other.  Beside  Mr.  Wirt  Mme. 
Montessori  seems  almost  a  beginner,  so  dar- 
ingly has   he   carried  the  principles   of  self- 


140         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

instruction  up  through  the  higher  grades. 
Even  visiting  teachers  and  superintendents  who 
wish  to  learn  the  theory  and  practice  of  the 
Gary  school  must  learn  in  the  same  way.  Mr. 
Wirt  does  not  lecture  to  them.  He  allows  them 
also  to  come  into  the  school  for  a  few  months 
as  helpers  to  teacher  or  principal.  Everybody 
who  has  anything  to  do  with  a  Gary  school  must 
evidently  learn  by  doing  the  real  work  itself. 
Nothing  shows  more  clearly  the  whole-knit  fiber 
of  Mr.  Wirt's  philosophy  than  this  new  kind  of 
'^ normal'^  school  for  visiting  teachers. 

I  was  pleased  with  the  absence  of  self- 
display.  Advertising  has  come  from  the  out- 
side. The  teachers  seem  innocent  of  the  great 
number  of  things  they  are  doing  which  a  large 
part  of  the  orthodox  educational  world  believes 
to  be  impossible.  You  are  talked  with  frankly 
and  genially,  but  nothing  is  done  to  impress 
you.  You  are  left  to  interpret  it  all  for  your- 
self. Those  who  miss  the  spirit  will  find  weak- 
nesses. Professional  educators  hold  up  hands 
of  horror  at  the  ^^ looseness"  of  the  teaching. 
They  miss  the  dramatic  effect  of  the  ^*  well- 
conducted  recitation" — the  drawing-out  of  the 
pupil's  memory,  or  the  appeals  to  glib  guesses 
at  what  the  teacher  wants.    They  judge  by  the 


THE  NATURAL  SCHOOL  141 

old-fashioned  standard  of  how  the  teacher  is 
teaching  rather  than  the  new  one  of  what  the 
child  is  learning.  My  complaint  wonld  be 
rather  that  there  was  still  too  much  teaching 
that  is  conventional,  particularly  in  the  lower 
grades.  And  I  have  an  animus  against  the 
deadly  desks  and  seats  which  are  still  in  use  in 
too  many  of  the  classrooms.  But  the  signifi- 
cant thing  is  that  this  kind  of  a  school  is  not 
static  or  completed,  but  a  constantly  growing 
organism.  The  only  limit  to  which  it  may  grow 
lies  in  the  imagination  and  initiative  of  teachers 
and  pupils.  And  the  school  cannot  be  judged 
in  cross-section.  Even  when  it  starts  with  so 
admirable  an  equipment,  its  life  has  just  begun. 
For  the  mechanical  and  artistic,  manual  work 
and  intellectual  study,  are  all  directed  towards 
enriching  the  physical  body  and  the  spiritual 
life  and  atmosphere  of  the  school.  This  inten- 
sive cultivation  of  resources  produces  that  ''em- 
bryonic community  life"  which  is  Professor 
Dewey's  ideal,  where  in  actual  work  the  child 
senses  the  occupations  and  interests  of  the 
larger  society  into  which  he  is  to  enter. 

Mr.  Wirt's  schools  would  be  unworthy  of  dis- 
cussion were  they  not  capable  of  imitation  gen- 
erally in  American  towns  and  cities.    Already 


142         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

a  number  of  communities  have  copied  the  essen- 
tial features,  and  Mr.  Wirt  is  at  present  occu- 
pied in  remodeling  a  few  of  the  New  York  City 
schools,  successfully,  too,  in  spite  of  the  fact 
that  New  York,  on  account  of  its  rapid  growth, 
its  great  alien  population,  and  its  political  cross- 
currents, presents  perhaps  the  most  formidable 
school  problems  in  the  country.  The  only  sub- 
stantial difficulty  in  remodeling  schools  accord- 
ing to  the  Gary  scheme  is  the  matter  of  play- 
grounds. Even  this  is  surmountable,  for  most 
cities  have  parks  or  usable  vacant  lots  within 
reach  of  the  school.  Mr.  Wirt's  great  triumph 
in  Gary  is  the  old  Jefferson  School  which  he 
found  when  he  came  to  the  town.  This  was  an 
orthodox  ten-room  building  built  by  the  city 
fathers  to  accommodate  Gary  children  for 
many  generations.  By  turning  the  spacious 
attic  into  a  gymnasium,  transforming  five  of  the 
classrooms  into  music  and  art  studios  and 
nature-study  laboratories,  by  building  a  jack-of- 
all-trades  workshop  around  the  engine-room  in 
the  cellar,  a  domestic-science  kitchen  in  an  un- 
used comer,  and  by  appropriating  a  nearby 
park  space,  he  transformed  a  perfectly  ordinary 
school  building,  whose  prototype  may  be  found 
in  every  town  in  the  land,  into  a  full-fledged. 


THE  NATURAL  SCHOOL  143 

varied  and  smoothly-functioning  Wirt  school. 
Through  the  ^^ rotation  of  crops''  system,  this 
school,  built  for  three  hundred  and  sixty  chil- 
dren, actually  accommodates  over  eight  hun- 
dred, and  gives  them  every  facility,  if  less  elab- 
orately, of  the  specially  designed  new  schools. 

Perhaps  I  may  here  recapitulate.  The  mere 
prosaic  business  economy  of  the  Wirt  scheme  is 
enough  to  recommend  it.  No  school  board  can 
afford  to  neglect  a  plan  which  not  only  saves 
money  to  the  taxpayers,  but  provides  better  fa- 
cilities, more  varied  equipment  and  better  edu- 
cational opportunities  than  even  well-to-do  com- 
munities can  at  present  afford.  The  Wirt 
school  solves  the  vexing  *' part-time"  problem. 
Gary  is  the  only  city  I  know  that  has  room 
(March,  1915)  in  its  present  buildings  for  at 
least  one-third  more  children  than  there  now  are 
to  go  to  school. 

In  the  second  place,  the  plan  solves  most  of 
the  problems  of  vocational  and  industrial  train- 
ing which  now  confront  the  public  school.  It 
catches  the  child's  curiosity  and  skill  on  the  up- 
stroke. It  makes  no  separation  of  manual  from 
intellectual  work,  and  avoids  that  sinister  caste- 
feeling  which  seems  to  be  creeping  into  the  vo- 
cational movement.    And  from  the  point   of 


144         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

view  of  economy  again,  the  scheme  of  devoting 
industrial  work  to  actual  care  of  the  school- 
plant  enables  the  school  to  provide  a  great  va- 
riety of  occupations  almost  without  additional 
cost  to  the  community. 

In  the  third  place,  the  plan  provides  a  large 
measure  of  individual  instruction.  It  is  a 
school  for  every  kind  of  a  child.  The  flexibility 
of  schedules,  the  cooperation  of  outside  agen- 
cies like  the  churches,  the  varied  activities,  give 
opportunity  for  the  fullest  development  of  dif- 
fering interests  and  capacities 

In  the  fourth  place,  the  plan  carries  out 
throughout  the  school  life  the  educational  truth 
that  learning  can  only  come  through  doing. 
The  habits  and  attitudes  of  careful  scientific  ob- 
servation, or  purposeful  interesting  activity 
which  is  neither  work  nor  play,  the  social,  demo- 
cratic, and  cooperative  background  which  such 
a  school  cultivates,  are  exactly  the  qualities  we 
need  for  our  younger  generation  in  American 
society. 

Such  a  school  carries  out  the  best  ideals  of 
American  democracy,  as  I  see  them,  in  an  ex- 
tremely effective  way.  Its  philosophy  is  Amer- 
ican, its  democratic  organization  is  American. 
It  is  one  of  the  institutions  that  our  American 


THE  NATURAL  SCHOOL  145 

culture  should  be  proudest  of.  Perhaps  pro- 
fessional educators,  accustomed  to  other  con- 
cepts and  military  methods  and  administrative 
illusions,  will  not  welcome  this  kind  of  school. 
But  teachers  hampered  by  drill  and  routine  will 
want  it,  and  so  will  parents  and  children. 


xvni 

THE   DEMOCEATIC   SCHOOL 

A  RECENT  article  in  the  ^^New  York 
Times''  (Oct.  17,  1915)  by  Dr.  Thomas 
S.  Baker,  Headmaster  of  the  Tome  School,  con- 
tains an  able  pedagogical  criticism  of  the  Gary 
school  which  is  typical  of  the  general  attitude 
towards  the  Gary  idea  on  the  part  of  conserva- 
tive schoolmen.  Nothing  could  bring  out  more 
clearly  the  difference  in  educational  values  be- 
tween this  professional  teaching  opinion  and 
the  broad  social  vision  of  Superintendent  Wirt. 
Dr.  Baker  admits  the  impressive  social  effec- 
tiveness of  the  plan.  It  is  ^'the  last  develop- 
ment in  socializing  the  schools.''  Mr.  Wirt  is 
^^not  only  an  educator,  but  also  a  social  re- 
former, a  city  worker."  But  Dr.  Baker's 
argument  is  really  the  specialized  pedagogical 
one  against  the  social.  Where  Mr.  Wirt  sees 
the  school  as  a  community  center,  a  children's 
world,  Dr.  Baker  sees  it  as  an  educational 
factory.  ^^The  social  value  of  the  Gary 
schools,"  he  says,  *4s  beyond  question.    Its 

146 


THE  DEMOCEATIC  SCHOOL        147 

pedagogic  excellence  has  still  to  be  deter- 
mined/' From  his  point  of  view,  a  school  is 
not  so  much  a  place  to  train  effective  citizens 
as  to  make  ^ thorough  scholars."  He  questions 
whether  ^Hhese  side  issues  in  the  scheme  of 
child-training" — the  gymnasia,  shops,  labora- 
tories, which  the  Gary  school  contains — ^^are 
really  essential  in  mental  development."  He 
is  afraid  that  the  young  citizens  of  Gary  learn 
more  from  their  industrial  shops  and  science 
laboratories  than  from  their  books. 

Dr.  Baker's  guarded  argument  is  really  a 
glorification  of  ^intellectual  discipline"  as 
against  an  intelligent  capacity  to  lead  an  or- 
ganic life  in  a  modern  society  which  needs 
above  all  things  resourceful  adaptation  and 
social  appreciations.  It  is  a  question  of  ideals, 
and  no  more  important  issue  was  ever  put  to 
a  people  than  this  one  of  how  we  want  our 
next  generation  trained.  The  school  is  not 
only  the  one  institution  which  assimilates  all 
the  people,  but  it  is  the  most  easily  modifiable. 
It  is  not  only  the  easiest  lever  of  social  prog- 
ress but  the  most  effective,  for  it  deals  with 
relatively  plastic  human  material.  To  decide 
what  kind  of  a  school  we  want  is  almost  to  de- 
cide what  kind  of  a  society  we  want. 


148         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

If  we  only  want  that  kind  of  a  school  which 
would  ^^make  hard-working  and  accurate 
scholars  and  produce  thoughtful  men,"  we 
must  resign  ourselves  to  a  progressive  soften- 
ing of  the  fiber  and  capacity  of  the  mass  of  our 
people.  The  average  educator  acts  as  if  he 
thought  of  his  child-world  as  a  level  plain  of 
capacities.  There  is  the  mass  of  unskilled, 
unawakened  minds ;  here  is  the  level  of  scholar- 
ship, knowledge,  civic  virtue,  appreciations. 
Education  is  to  him  the  process  of  lifting  up 
the  mass  from  their  primitive  level  to  the 
higher  one.  The  public  school  is  the  elevator 
into  which  all  are  to  be  shoveled  and  trans- 
ported to  the  upper  story.  And  the  American 
public  school  in  the  last  fifty  years  has  been 
faithfully  following  this  ideal. 

The  truth  is,  of  course,  that  mental  aptitude 
is  not  any  such  level  desert,  but  rather  a  series 
of  inclined  planes.  When  we  try  to  educate 
all  the  children  of  all  the  people,  w^e  are  not 
dealing  with  a  homogeneous  mass,  but  with  slid- 
ing scales  of  capacity.  A  mental  test  of  the 
school-children  of  a  state  would  reveal  an  in- 
cline extending  in  orderly  gradation  from  the 
genius  down  to  the  imbecile.  A  physical  test 
would  give  us  a  different  slant,  a  test  for  ar- 


THE  DEMOCRATIC  SCHOOL       149 

tistic  or  mechanical  capacity  another.  Stand 
at  the  center  of  divine  average  and  try  to  lever 
any  of  these  slopes  into  a  horizontal  position 
and  you  find  half  of  your  society  squatting 
heavily  at  the  lower  end.  You  may  ascribe  it 
to  race  capacity,  personal  heredity,  social  en- 
vironment, malnutrition,  defective  nervous  or- 
ganization or  anything  you  please,  but  the  fact 
remains  that  the  greater  part  of  the  human  raw 
material  will  be  permanently  resistive  to  or 
only  dully  appreciative  of  any  attempts  to  ele- 
vate them  to  a  level.  This  is  true  of  any  ca- 
pacity you  may  choose.  The  outstanding  truth 
of  society  seems  to  be  the  heterogeneous  distri- 
bution of  capacities.  And  the  irony  of  it  is 
that  after  artistic  capacity  true  intellectual 
capacity  is  probably  the  rarest.  For  the  public 
school  to  try  to  make  intellectualists  of  all  its 
children  is  a  sheer  defiance  of  sociological 
reality. 

Some  educators,  while  they  recognize  this  di- 
versity, yet  insist  on  uniform  standards,  uni- 
form curricula,  uniform  discipline,  on  the 
ground  that  social  order  in  a  democracy  is  im- 
periled unless  the  highest  degree  of  like-mind- 
edness  prevails.  Such  a  democracy  would  be 
the  stagnant  democracy  of  China.    The  result 


150         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

of  tl^ese  attempts  at  standardization  have  been 
the  automatic  centrifugal  flinging  off  into  space 
of  the  children  whose  interests  were  not  intel- 
lectual, who  were  no  more  capable  of  being 
made  into  ^* accurate  scholars"  than  they  were 
into  artists  and  poets.  And  from  those  who 
did  not  get  quite  flung  off,  but  clung  on  with 
their  teeth,  we  get  most  of  our  prevailing 
pseudo-culture.  To  keep  on  trying  to  ^*  de- 
velop the  mind"  and  produce  ^^ thorough  schol- 
arship" in  those  whom  we  force  to  submit  to 
educational  processes,  means  simply  to  go  on 
creating  a  nerveless  and  semi-helpless  mass  of 
boys  and  girls  who  will  never  take  their  ef- 
fective and  interested  place  in  the  world  be- 
cause they  have  no  mental  tools  which  they  can 
wield.  Such  a  course  is  coming  to  be  generally 
recognized  as  a  kind  of  slow  national  suicide,  a 
slow  suffocation  of  industrial  and  social 
progress. 

The  schools  do  change,  but  the  schoolmen 
yield  grudgingly.  Nothing  could  be  more 
naive  than  the  test  which  Dr.  Baker  proposes 
for  evaluating  the  Gary  plan.  Submit,  he  says, 
the  highest  class  in  the  Gary  schools  to  an 
examination  by  the  College  Examining  Board. 
If  the  students  pass,  the  Gary  system  will  be 


THE  DEMOCRATIC  SCHOOL       151 

justified  of  its  children.  Was  ever  a  more  pa- 
tent assertion  of  the  professional  bias?  Let 
the  children  drop  out  of  the  lower  grades  un- 
trained except  in  the  rudiments,  but  if  the  small 
minority  in  the  highest  class  passes  its  Vergil 
and  algebra  and  English  literature  and  German 
with  marks  as  high  as  the  graduates  of  the 
Tome  School,  then  the  Gary  system  will  cease 
to  be  considered  a  ^^mere  experiment."  If  this 
is  what  the  critics  of  the  Gary  plan  mean  when 
they  plead  for  an  ^devaluation  of  this  novel  ex- 
periment," we  may  well  hope  that  it  will  escape 
the  peril. 

Such  a  conception  of  educational  values  can- 
not become  too  speedily  obsolete.  A  public 
school  is  a  mockery  unless  it  educates  the  pub- 
lic. It  cannot  make  the  rarefied  and  strained 
product  at  the  top  the  test  of  its  effectiveness. 
And  the  public  is  not  ideally  educated  unless  its 
individuals — all  of  them — are  intelligent,  in- 
formed, skilled,  resourceful,  up  to  the  limit  of 
their  respective  capacities.  Life  itself  can  no 
longer  be  trusted  to  provide  this  education ;  the 
school  must  substitute.  The  Gary  school  de- 
liberately sets  such  an  ideal.  Democracy  does 
not  mean  uniformity,  but  it  does  mean  equality 
of  opportunity.    A  democratic  school  would  be 


152         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

one  where  every  child  had  the  chance  to  dis- 
cover and  develop  aptitude.  The  Gary  school, 
with  its  harmonious  activities  of  intellectual, 
manual,  artistic  and  scientific  work,  physical 
education  and  play,  gives  just  this  chance. 
Democratic  education  does  not  mean  the  pro- 
vision of  separate  schools  for  different  kinds  of 
children,  or  even  separate  courses  in  the  same 
school,  as  the  movement  for  industrial  educa- 
tion is  now  threatening  to  bring.  This  is  to 
create  at  once  invidious  distinctions,  and  fasten 
class  education  upon  us.  To  say  that  children 
are  different  does  not  mean  that  some  are  fitted 
to  be  scholars  and  others  to  be  manual  workers, 
some  to  be  artists  and  some  to  be  scientists. 
The  differences  are  differences  of  focus  and  not 
of  quality. 

To  most  children  will  appear  in  the  course  of 
school  life  some  dominant  interest,  and  it  is 
upon  the  cultivation  of  that  interest  that  the 
child's  chance  of  being  more  than  a  nerveless 
mediocrity  will  depend.  It  is  upon  that  train- 
ing that  his  chance  of  being  absorbed  out  of  the 
school  into  the  social  and  industrial  world  will 
depend.  At  the  same  time,  without  a  common 
background  with  his  fellows  he  will  be  alien  and 
adrift  in  the  world.    Interest  and  skill  in  one's 


THE  DEMOCEATIC  SCHOOL       153 

work,  whether  it  be  making  automobiles  or 
teaching  Greek,  an  acquaintance  with  the  con- 
temporary world,  an  alert  intelligence  which  is 
always  seeking  to  diminish  the  area  of  things 
human  that  are  alien  to  one — a  man  or  woman 
with  this  would  be  truly  educated  in  any  society. 
But  both  focus  and  background  are  supremely 
necessary.  The  present  educational  system 
does  not  really  set  itself  to  provide  either. 
Only  in  a  school  organized  on  some  such  plan 
as  the  Gary  plan  will  such  education  be  possible. 
This  does  not  mean  that  every  child  is  to  mar- 
velously  blossom  into  ideally  alert  and  skilled 
intelligence.  But  we  can  be  sure  that  a  school 
which  gives  opportunity  for  the  development  of 
the  most  varied  aptitudes  in  the  free  play  of 
a  child-community  life  will  have  done  all  that 
it  could.  No  one  pretends  that  the  Gary  edu- 
cation is  the  intrinsically  ideal  education  for 
all  time.  But  we  can  say  that,  given  the  best 
social  demands  of  America  to-day,  this  school 
will  make  for  the  most  robust,  effective,  intelli- 
gent citizenship  of  which  we  are  at  present 
capable. 


XIX 

THE   TKAIIS^ED   MIND 

HOW  much  longer  are  we  to  expect  the 
headmasters  of  our  private  secondary 
schools  to  view  with  anything  but  alarm  the  cur- 
rent radical  tendencies  in  education?  In  the 
November  ^^ Atlantic,"  Dr.  Alfred  E.  Stearns 
of  Phillips-Andover  is  stirred  to  wrath  against 
the  fallacies  of  the  modern  school  as  expounded 
by  Mr.  Flexner  and  others.  The  paper  con- 
tributes little  new  to  the  well-worn  theory  of 
mental  discipline  upon  which  upper-class  edu- 
cation has  so  long  been  based.  But  it  is  highly 
significant  as  a  pattern  of  the  '^trained"  mind 
as  it  works  in  the  exposure  of  fallacies.  Dr. 
Stearns  is  presumably  an  immensely  successful 
product  of  the  old  idealistic  and  linguistic  edu- 
cation, gained  by  strenuous  effort  and  vigorous 
thinking.  It  is  worth  while  to  examine  how 
such  a  mind  argues,  what  it  considers  as  clinch- 
ing evidence,  how  it  hopes  to  convince  the  alert 
intellectual  of  to-day. 

154 


THE  TRAINED  MIND  155 

The  *4allacies"  in  modern  education  which 
Dr.  Stearns  is  exposing  are  the  materialistic 
and  utilitarian  ideal,  the  belief  in  the  non-trans- 
f erability  of  mental  power  from  one  field  to  an- 
other, the  cultivation  of  interest  rather  than 
discipline,  of  play  rather  than  drudgery,  the 
scientific  rather  than  the  cultural  emphasis. 
He  wishes  to  persuade  the  reader  that  all  these 
tendencies  make  for  the  perversion  of  the 
child's  character,  the  weakening  of  his  mental 
grasp,  the  materializing  of  his  soul.  One  waits 
eagerly  for  proofs  of  such  very  serious  menaces. 
The  student  of  education  to-day  is  rapidly  ac- 
quiring a  belief  in  objective  evidence,  in  sta- 
tistical or  at  least  analytic  experiment,  in  scien- 
tific formulation.  The  kind  of  evidence  that 
appeals  to  the  alert  student  to-day  is  the  kind 
that  comes  out  of  the  psychological  laboratory 
of  Clark  University,  or  Columbia  or  Chicago, 
out  of  the  great  city  school  surveys,  like  Port- 
land or  Cleveland  or  New  York,  out  of  the 
experimental  schools  in  different  parts  of  the 
country.  These  are  the  arenas  where  educa- 
tional problems  will,  he  believes,  ultimately  be 
solved.  And  to  him  the  so-called  * 'fallacies" 
in  modern  education  are  not  ^'dogmas"  or 
'^ assumptions"  at  all,  but  rather  hopeful  hy- 


156         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

potheses  which  are  now  being  tested  in  dozens 
of  American  schools. 

Is  this  the  sort  of  evidence  to  which  Dr. 
Stearns'  trained  mind  appeals  when  he  wishes 
to  discredit  the  ^^new"  education?  Not  at  all. 
He  does  not  even  so  much  as  show  that  he  is 
acquainted  with  the  existence  of  the  great  mass 
of  literature  which  would  throw  light  on  the 
success  or  failure  of  the  radical  theories  which 
he  deplores.  Educational  journals,  school  sur- 
veys, reports  of  intelligence  tests,  descriptions 
of  play  schools, — none  of  these  seem  to  have 
come  into  contact  with  his  training.  For  the 
benefit  of  the  philosophically-minded,  he  does 
not  even  refer  to  the  writings  of  Dewey  or  Hall, 
or  the  other  radical  writers  on  education.  All 
this  writing  and  doing  which  represents  the  new 
education  at  work,  he  lumps  into  'the  pedagog- 
ical expert, '^  upon  whom  he  lavishes  his  anxious 
scorn.  The  only  concrete  data  he  offers  is  the 
record  of  the  College  Examination  Board,  which 
Dr.  Flexner,  whom  he  is  criticizing,  had  cited  in 
his  '  *  Modern  School. ' '  Dr.  Flexner  had  argued 
against  Latin  and  mathematics  in  the  second- 
ary school  on  the  ground  that  the  majority  of 
even  the  picked  students  failed  in  them.  Dr. 
Stearns  succeeds  in  showing  that  a  majority  of 


THE  TEAINED  MIND  157 

college  candidates  fail  not  only  in  Latin  and 
Algebra  but  in  all  other  subjects  as  well.  The 
normal  mind,  untrained  by  the  old  dispensation, 
would  consider  these  statistics  very  damaging 
to  Dr.  Stearns'  cause.  The  inexorable  con- 
clusion would  be  not  that  Latin  and  algebra 
should  be  retained  in  the  secondary  school  cur- 
riculum, but  that  the  entire  curriculum  should 
undergo  a  radical  reorganization  in  teaching 
methods  and  educational  philosophy. 

Dr.  Stearns,  like  most  of  the  critics  of  the 
^^new"  education,  makes  the  fundamental  error 
of  confusing  the  narrow  business  man,  who  sees 
no  ^^use''  for  his  son's  taking  Latin  or  algebra 
in  school,  with  the  ^*new"  educator  who  would 
give  these  subjects  a  new  orientation  in  the 
curriculum.  The  ^^ practical"  business  man  is 
as  much  anathema  to  the  *^ modern  school"  as 
he  is  to  the  cultural  school.  The  ^^  modern 
school"  would  not  refuse  any  subject  to  minds 
that  fed  upon  it  and  fused  it  into  vital  ex- 
perience. But  it  would  not  force  it  on  minds 
that  could  not  digest  it.  And  Dr.  Stearns '  own 
figures  show  how  generally  indigestible,  with 
all  the  drudgery  and  mental  discipline  in  the 
world,  is  the  entire  conventional  secondary 
school   curriculum.    The  pseudo-modern  high 


158         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

school  where  science  and  manual  arts  have  been 
added,  only  to  be  taught  in  the  same  unillumi- 
nated  way,  is  as  objectionable  to  the  *^new" 
educator  as  it  is  to  Dr.  Steams. 

Since  the  latter 's  only  use  of  objective  evi- 
dence proves  a  boomerang,  what  considerations 
does  he  think  will  be  persuasive  in  his  attack 
on  the  *^new'^  education?  It  is  easy  to  see. 
His  reliance  is  entirely  on  authority,  upon  per- 
sonal belief.  Several  very  successful  business 
men  of  his  acquaintance  attribute  their  success 
to  the  training  of  the  old  education.  The  ma- 
jority of  schoolmasters  are  not  yet  ready  to 
abandon  the  doctrine  of  mental  discipline.  The 
sons  of  Mr.  Hill  go  to  college  to  get  something 
which  their  father,  for  all  his  success,  recog- 
nizes that  he  missed.  It  is  a  serious  question 
in  the  minds  of  many  observers  whether  Dr. 
Eliot's  advocacy  of  ^  *  observational' '  training 
is  sound.  Always  the  reference  to  personal 
authority,  to  prestige,  to  anything  but  objective 
standards  on  which  both  sides  may  agree !  Al- 
ways the  naive  appeal  to  schoolmasters  and  suc- 
cessful business  men,  the  pillars  of  his  world! 
Dr.  Steams  deplores  the  materialistic  trend  of 
the  age,  but  he  does  not  consider  how  power- 
fully his  own  innocent  use  of  the  verdict  of  sue- 


THE  TRAINED  MIND  159 

cessful  business  men  as  scientific  evidence  is 
likely  to  glorify  material  success  in  the  minds  of 
his  students. 

Dr.  Stearns'  logic  is  as  unconvincing  as  his 
evidence.  A  doctrine  is  monstrous.  There- 
fore, he  implies,  it  is  untrue.  Intelligent  chil- 
dren are  usually  bright  in  all  their  school  sub- 
jects. Therefore,  if  you  force  a  child  to  learn 
through  drudgery,  you  automatically  endow  him 
with  general  intelligence.  The  interest  of  boys 
in  wireless  telegraphy  and  automobiles,  he 
thinks,  is  the  best  argument  for  keeping  all 
these  things  out  of  a  school  where  one  must 
learn  to  work.  At  the  same  time.  Dr.  Stearns 
objects  to  scientific  schools  because  students 
so  soon  lose  interest  in  their  work.  But,  ac- 
cording to  the  gospel  of  drudgery,  why  would 
not  this  make  science  the  ideal  *' mental  disci- 
pline ' '  ? 

Such  a  paper  as  this  shows  the  technique  of 
a  thoroughly  obsolete  mind.  Such  ^^  mental 
discipline''  as  this  old  education  gave  is  evi- 
dently of  little  use  in  handling  a  world  of  facts, 
of  experiment,  of  recorded  tests.  Criticism 
does  not  make  such  thinkers  critical.  It  only 
makes  them  belligerent.  They  do  not  analyze, 
they  repel.     They  are  more   interested  in   a 


160         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

moral  justification  for  the  structure  of  their 
craft  and  their  practices  than  in  the  truth.  Dr. 
Stearns '  paper  is  the  best  evidence  of  how  little 
relevant  is  the  old  linguistic  and  idealistic  edu- 
cation to  the  intellectual  demands  of  to-day. 
The  critical,  analytic,  impersonal,  experimental 
approach  is  wholly  lacking  in  his  paper.  His 
evidence  is  personal  authority,  his  logic  is  spe- 
cial pleading.  Parents  with  sons  in  private 
schools  might  well  view  with  grave  concern  the 
kind  of  'drained  mind"  which  is  likely  to  be 
developed  under  such  masters  of  the  old  edu- 
cation. They  might  ask  how  likely  a  boy, 
taught  to  use  his  mind  the  way  Dr.  Stearns 
uses  his,  is  to  analyze  and  grasp  the  complex 
facts  of  the  world  into  which  he  will  come. 


CLASS   AND   SCHOOL 

THE  proposed  experimental  school  which 
the  General  Education  Board  is  to  found 
in  conjunction  with  Teachers'  College  in  New 
York  has  sent  a  shiver  through  the  conservative 
schoolmen  of  America.  It  is  assumed  that  the 
policy  of  the  new  school  will  follow  Dr.  Flex- 
ner's  manifesto  of  the  ^'Modern  School,"  that 
adroit  and  uncompromising  crystallization  of 
the  radical  philosophy  of  our  new  American 
education.  Dr.  Flexner  has  proved  himself  to 
be  an  admirable  agitator,  for  he  has  succeeded, 
with  doctrines  that  public-school  educators  have 
been  discussing  for  ten  years  and  which  experi- 
mental schools  all  through  the  country  have 
been  testing  out,  in  rousing  the  slumberous 
camp  of  private  secondary  schoolmasters  to  a 
sense  of  what  is  going  on  in  the  educational 
world.  The  private  secondary  school  is  the  last 
stronghold  of  educational  conservatism.  En- 
lightenment has  to  proceed  upward  through 

161 


162         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

thick  layers  of  prejudice  and  smugness.  Dr. 
Flexner's  voice  seems  to  have  broken  in  the 
walls  and  gotten  a  hearing  for  the  new  educa- 
tion even  in  the  walls  of  the  traditional  New 
England  academy.  It  is  for  these  people  that 
the  ''Modern  '^ School"  was  written,  for  only 
those  will  find  its  proposals  '^  revolutionary  and 
dangerous''  who  have  never  read  a  line  of 
Dewey  or  G.  Stanley  Hall,  never  read  a  copy  of 
an  educational  journal,  never  visited  an  experi- 
mental school,  or  even  the  newer  plants  of  the 
best  public  schools  in  American  cities.  There 
is  irony  in  the  location  of  the  new  school  at 
Teachers'  College.  For  the  latter  has  been  one 
of  the  most  persistently  experimental  educa- 
tional centers  in  the  country.  If  its  ''model" 
schools  have  felt  in  the  course  of  time  the 
blighting  touch  of  conventionality,  at  least  in 
the  Speyer  course  of  industrial  arts  there  has 
been  developed  a  method  of  permanent  value. 
There  is  no  more  accurate  application  of  Dr. 
Flexner's  demand  that  ''children  should  begin 
by  getting  acquainted  with  objects,"  "follow  the 
life-cycles  of  plants  and  animals,"  "the  ob- 
servation and  execution  of  industrial  and  com- 
mercial processes,"  and  so  forth.  In  this  in. 
dustrial  arts  course  the  children  are  concerned 


CLASS  AND  SCHOOL  163 

from  the  beginning  with  food-products  and 
clothing  and  building  and  the  way  different 
peoples  make  their  living.  Out  of  this  handling 
of  homely  things  grow  the  geography  and 
science  and  history  and  mathematics.  It  seems 
only  a  question  of  time  before  there  will  be 
scarcely  an  elementary  school  untouched  by  this 
practical  approach  to  knowledge  through  ob- 
jects and  projects  and  concrete  facts. 

Dr.  Flexner's  tilting  is  not  against  our  rap- 
idly improving  public  elementary  school  so 
much  as  it  is  against  the  private  secondary 
school,  with  its  sub-college,  classical,  formal 
curriculum,  and  its  obsolete  educational  theory 
of  formal  discipline  and  salvation  through 
drudgery.  It  is  as  an  object-lesson  for  this 
branch  of  American  education  that  the  new 
school  will  have  permanent  value.  It  will  be 
the  heaviest  assault  which  has  yet  had  to  be 
met  by  that  vested  educational  interest  which 
we  know  as  the  private  secondary  school.  The 
private  school  has  made  it  its  function  to  pre- 
pare the  sons  and  daughters  of  the  well-to-do 
for  college,  and  so  keep  up  the  tradition  of  lei- 
sured and  cultured  wealth.  This  is  the  ideal 
at  the  bottom  of  the  hearts  of  the  conservative 
schoolmen.     A  knowledge  which  is  useless,  like 


164         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

the  formal  classics  and  mathemathics,  is  only 
a  sharpened  tool  of  exclusiveness,  for  only  the 
younger  generation  of  a  ruling  class  can  afford 
to  give  its  time  to  it.  In  a  growing  industrial 
society  such  an  education  becomes  ever  more 
and  more  a  dividing  line  between  classes.  That 
the  public  high  school  has  been  largely  con- 
trolled by  the  same  ideals  does  not  mean  at  all 
that  this  kind  of  education  has  been  democra- 
tized, but  merely  that  the  unthinking  and  clam- 
bering middle  classes  have  been  hypnotized  by 
vague  aspirations  of  ^'culture"  and  ^intellec- 
tual training"  into  imitation  of  the  traditional 
ruling-class  education.  Some  of  the  strongest 
opposition  to  vocational  education  in  the  pub- 
lic schools  comes  even  from  the  ranks  of  the  am- 
bitious wage-earners  who  ^'want  their  children 
to  have  the  educational  advantages  they  were 
denied."  They  resent  what  they  misinterpret 
as  an  attempt  to  keep  their  younger  generation 
in  a  subordinate  labor  class.  What  they  do  not 
see  is  that  the  traditional  education  which  they 
admire  is  no  real  education  for  the  modern 
world.  We  find  the  industrious  proletarian  and 
the  exclusive  Tory  joining  hands  in  opposing 
the  new  democratic  education  which  is  meant 
to  have  the  effects  of  freeing  both  classes  and 


CLASS  AND  SCHOOL  165 

making  them  fit  together  to  administer  a  free 
society.  The  Tory  wants  to  keep  for  his  chil- 
dren his  privileged  status;  the  wage-earner 
wants  to  obtain  for  his  children  this  privileged 
status.  ^^Book"  education,  innocent  of  prac- 
ticality and  use,  is  still  an  accepted  mark  of 
this  geniality.  Neither  class  has  any  real  sense 
yet  of  a  democratic  attitude  that  finds  both  the 
^^ utilitarian'^  and  the  '^cultural"  irrelevant 
terms,  and  demands  only  effective  activity  and 
imaginative  understanding  from  every  citizen 
up  to  the  limit  of  his  capacity. 

The  *^old"  education  then  is  a  class-educa- 
tion, and  therefore  has  no  place  in  a  society 
which  is  trying  to  become  democratic.  How 
much  class-feeling  is  behind  the  current  alle- 
giance to  the  education  of  discipline  and 
drudgery  is  shown  in  a  paper  by  Miss  Edith 
Hamilton  of  the  Bryn  Mawr  School  in  the  ^ '  New 
Eepublic"  for  February  10,  1917.  She  pleads 
for  the  ^^old"  education  in  behalf  of  her  girls. 
But  when  she  says  ^ ^school''  she  has  in  the  back 
of  her  mind  an  institution  for  the  training  of  the 
well-to-do  classes.  Her  argument  against  a 
change  in  education  seems  to  be  based  on  the 
idea  that  change  would  be  prejudicial  to  the 
life  which  she  accepts  as  worthiest  for  those 


166         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

fortunate  classes  with  which  she  is  best  ac- 
quainted. Her  argument  is  that  life  will  make 
no  stern  demands  upon  the  sheltered,  econom- 
ically endowed  leisure  which  most  of  her  girls 
will  enjoy.  Without  external  standards  their 
fiber  must  deteriorate  unless  they  have  learned 
the  joy  of  work  by  the  doing  of  things  because 
they  are  hard.  Without  impersonal  intellectual 
interests,  their  personal  energy,  she  says,  will 
waste  away  in  futility  or  in  a  meddlesome  con- 
trol of  their  own  daughters.  The  boy  is  har- 
nessed into  some  kind  of  self-discipline  by  the 
exigencies  of  business  life.  But  for  the  girl, 
the  substitution  in  the  '* modern  school"  of  do- 
mestic science  for  ^^ elegant  accomplishments" 
is  only  an  illusory  discipline.  Not  only  are 
these  arts  of  housekeeping  too  easy  to  provide 
discipline,  but  they  will  never  be  demanded 
from  the  upper-class  girl.  Only  the  traditional 
curriculum,  therefore,  impersonal,  cultural,  la- 
borious, will  give  her  the  needed  stimulus  to 
play  her  leisured  role  worthily. 

At  first  sight  nothing  could  be  more  ironic 
than  this  gospel  of  strenuous  effort  preached  in 
the  name  of  a  sheltered  class.  Why  should  a 
girl  be  disciplined,  trained  to  do  things  '^be- 
cause  they  are  hard,"  for  a  life  which  becomes 


CLASS  AND  SCHOOL  167 

^^ easier  and  easier,"  unless  her  teachers  wish 
to  provide  her  with  some  kind  of  moral  and 
intellectual  justification  for  her  social  role? 
The  ^^old"  education  combines  uselessness  and 
effort,  and  it  is  just  this  combination  which 
would  maintain  leisure-class  functions  and  yet 
leave  the  individuals  morally  justified.  The 
uselessness  makes  you  exclusive  and  the  effort 
satisfies  your  moral  sense.  It  is  a  little  curious 
to  find  Miss  Hamilton  using  the  ^' utilitarian" 
argument  against  domestic  science,  that  is,  that 
it  will  never  be  used  by  her  girls.  Yet  she 
wishes  them  to  acquire  *  impersonal  intellectual 
interests,"  which  they  can  never  use  except  in 
not  very  real  ^^ cultural"  dabblings  and  social 
work. 

Miss  Hamilton's  argument  for  tradition  is 
the  orthodox  one  that  is  now  being  repeated  by 
all  those  who  oppose  the  new  Eockefeller  school. 
^*The  old  education  is  superior  to  any  training 
which  makes  interest  not  discipline,  efficiency 
not  knowledge,  the  standard."  Now  this  point 
at  issue  between  interest  and  discipline  has  been 
so  thoroughly  discussed  by  John  Dewey  in  his 
^^ Interest  as  Belated  to  Will"  and  other  writ- 
ings, that  one  is  surprised  at  this  late  day  to 
find  responsible  educators  who  are  willing  to 


168         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

give  the  impression  that  they  are  unacquainted 
'^with  Dewey's  arguments.  Even  if  disciples  like 
Dr.  Flexner  and  myself  in  our  enthusiasm  un- 
consciously caricature  him,  the  philosophy  is 
there  in  its  classic  form  in  Dewey  for  all  to  read. 
The  curious  notion  of  the  ''old"  educator  that 
interest  makes  work  ''easy,"  instead  of  intensi- 
fying, the  effort,  is  only  possible,  of  course,  to 
minds  soaked  in  a  Puritan  tradition.  Dewey 
"shows  that  interest  and  discipline  are  not  antag- 
onistic to  efficiency  and  knowledge,  but  that 
knowledge  is  merely  information  effectively 
used  and  manipulated,  and  discipline  is  willed 
and  focused  interest.  Each  has  an  element  of 
the  other.  It  is  meaningless  to  talk  of  interest 
vs.  discipline  when  all  real  interest  has  an  or- 
ganizing effect  on  one's  activity,  and  any  real 
discipline  is  built  up  on  a  foundation  of  in- 
terest. Indeed  in  one  of  my  articles  to  which 
Miss  Hamilton  takes  exception,  I  define  disci- 
pline as  "willed  skill,"  which  is  as  far  from  any 
conception  of  "making  things  easy,"  of  "smat- 
tering and  superficiality,"  as  could  well  be 
imagined.  It  is  a  superstition,  of  course,  as 
Miss  Hamilton  says,  to  suppose  that  all  chil- 
dren bum  with  a  hard  gem-like  flame  of  curios- 
ity to  know,  but  it  is  equally  a  superstition 


CLASS  AND  SCHOOL  169 

to  suppose  that  with  all  children  strenuous 
drudgery  flowers  into  the  immense  joy  of  work 
and  creation,  or  that  effort  taken  consistently 
against  the  grain  of  interest  can  suddenly  be 
transmuted  into  spontaneous  activity.  A  cer- 
tain habit,  a  mechanical  routine  spirit,  may  be 
evolved  by  drudgery,  but  not  imaginative  skill. 
All  true  discipline  comes  from  overcoming  ob- 
stacles beyond  which  one  is  conscious  of  a  goal 
in  itself  worth  while.  It  is  only  a  feeble  spirit 
which  can  be  drugged  by  effort  in  and  for  itself. 
In  those  admired  cases  where  facility  comes 
after  conscientious  but  uninteresting  effort,  let 
the  old-fashioned  educator  ask  herself  whether 
the  child  gained  the  satisfaction  of  accomplish- 
ment because  he  went  through  the  discipline, 
or  whether  it  was  not  only  because  he  liked  the 
satisfaction  of  accomplishment  that  he  was 
willing  to  go  through  the  drudgery.  If  you  ad- 
mit the  latter,  then  you  have  admitted  the  case ! 
for  the  new  education.  Temperaments,  im- 
pulses, interests — or,  if  you  like,  the  lack  of  in-  \ 
terests — ^will  insist  on  dominating,  on  determin- 
ing the  way  each  child  takes  his  experience. 
All  education  can  ever  do  is  to  provide  the  ex- 
perience, and  stimulate,  guide,  organize  inter- 
ests.   Anything  else  may  produce,  at  its  best, 


170         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

a  trained  animal.    It  will  not  be  education,  and 
it  will  not  produce  men  and  women. 

The  task  of  the  democratic  school  is  to  pro- 
vide just  this  general  experience  and  stimula- 
tion. Miss  Hamilton's  paper  shows  that  such 
a  school  would  be  a  challenge  to  the  kind  of  in- 
stitution she  has  in  mind  when  she  speaks  of 
education.  "When  leisure-class  functions  and 
leisure-class  education  clasp  in  a  perfect  circle, 
a  new  sociological  and  industrial  emphasis,  such 
as  the  *' Modern  School"  suggests,  might  make 
the  leisure-class  pupils  uneasy,  restless,  ques- 
tioning. If  you  began  emphasizing  interest  in- 
stead of  drudgery,  you  might  find  yourself 
calling  into  question  the  sincerity  of  those 
^ impersonal  intellectual  interests."  If  you 
emphasized  efficiency  instead  of  knowledge,  you 
might  make  uncomfortably  evident  the  unreality 
of  much  of  what  passes  for  culture  in  society 
to-day.  You  would  be  making  insecure  the 
moral  and  intellectual  justifications  of  caste. 
But  that  is  exactly  the  critical  and  undermin- 
ing work  which  a  democratic  education  is  de- 
signed to  stimulate. 

These  new  educators  are  seeking  a  type  of 
school  which  shall  provide  for  children  as  hu- 
man beings  and  not  as  members  of  any  one  so- 


CLASS  AND  SCHOOL  171 

cial  class.  They  want  a  school  which  creates  a 
common  sympathy,  a  common  intimacy  with  the 
various  activities  and  expressions  of  the  modern 
well-rounded  personality,  just  so  far  as  each  in- 
dividual is  capable,  with  his  endowments  and 
intelligence,  of  acquiring  such  an  intimacy. 
The  *^ Modern  School"  would  turn  the  child's 
attention  to  the  projects,  objects,  processes, 
facts,  of  the  active  world  about  him,  not  because 
they  are  good  in  themselves,  but  because  they 
are  the  common  stock  of  all  classes.  The  de- 
velopment of  communal  functions  and  services 
forces  every  family  more  or  less  into  touch  with 
the  active  world  out  of  which  the  **  Modern 
School's"  curriculum  grows.  It  is  in  the  study ' 
of  these  '^real  things,"  rather  than  in  the  log- 
ical systems  of  text-books,  the  predigested 
ideals  of  literature  or  a  leisured  class,  the  tech- 
nical manipulation  of  dead  languages  and  offi- 
cial science,  that  common  interest  and  the  sense 
of  common  possession  will  arise.  The  expecta- 
tion is  that  interpretations  and  ideals  which 
grow  out  of  such  a  study  will  be  more  vital  and 
sound  because  they  will  have  come  out  of  the 
child's  own  experience,  and  not  have  been 
merely  shoveled  into  his  memory.  It  is  ex- 
pected that  the  ^^ strenuous  effort"  of  the  past. 


172         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

which  was  so  much  an  effort  of  memory  and 
routine,  will  become,  in  a  curriculum  harnessed 
to  occupational  life,  an  effort  of  interest  and  in- 
telligent enthusiasm.  Out  of  such  a  spirit  and 
such  a  school  should  issue  the  self-sustained  dis- 
cipline by  which  all  good  work  is  done  in  the 
world. 


XXI 

A  POLICY   IN   VOCATIONAL   EDUCATION 

NOW  that  the  passage  of  the  Smith-Hughes 
bill  is  assured,  interest  moves  to  the  dis- 
tribution of  this  federal  subsidy  for  vocational 
continuation  and  part-time  schools.  For  the 
actual  sums  appropriated,  even  the  maximum 
which  will  be  available  in  nine  years,  are  too 
small  to  be  of  constructive  significance.  Indeed 
there  is  something  grotesque  about  the  solemn 
and  arduous  study  which  went  into  the  passage 
of  this  timid  educational  bill  by  a  Congress 
which  could  appropriate  a  full  third  of  a  billion 
for  armaments.  The  Smith-Hughes  bill  has  all 
the  aspect  of  a  pious  wish  rather  than  the  be- 
ginning of  a  thorough  national  policy  in  educa- 
tion. There  was  nothing  revolutionary  in  this 
principle  of  federal  aid.  The  principle  was  es- 
tablished by  the  Morrill  act  of  1862  and  recently 
confirmed  by  the  Smith-Lever  bill  for  agricul- 
tural education.  The  halting  character  of  this 
new  legislation  must  be  explained  partly  by  the 

173 


174         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

novelty  of  vocational  training  in  America  and 
by  the  extremely  confused  condition  of  mind 
about  it. 

We  scarcely  know  yet  how  to  institute  a  voca- 
tional education  that  will  make  out  of  our  youth 
effective  workers  and  at  the  same  time  free  and 
initiating  citizens.  The  hopeless  lack  of  co- 
ordination between  industry  and  our  educa- 
tional system  blocks  and  bewilders  our  efforts. 
In  working  towards  a  solution  we  meet  two  very 
real  perils.  When  we  attempt  a  coordination 
we  run  the  risk  of  turning  the  public  school  into 
a  mere  preparatory  school  for  factory,  store  and 
workshop,  producing  helpless  workers  riveted 
by  their  very  training  to  a  rigid  and  arbitrary 
industrial  life.  The  better  trained  they  are,  or 
at  least  the  more  intense  their  specialization, 
the  greater  will  be  their  subjection.  Organized 
labor  fears,  and  not  unjustly,  that  a  public  vo- 
cational education  might  be  the  means  of  over- 
crowding the  labor  market  and  thereby  '^fur- 
nishing strike-breakers  to  industry."  This  is 
always  the  danger  when  we  attempt  to  adjust 
our  training  too  tightly  to  existing  industrial 
conditions.  On  the  other  hand,  if  we  try  to 
evade  this  danger  and  make  the  young  worker's 
training  more  general,  so  that  a  number  of  fields 


VOCATIONAL  EDUCATION         175 

of  industrial  opportunity  will  be  open  to  him, 
we  may  leave  him  more  helpless  than  ever,  for 
he  has  no  assurance  of  being  fit  for  the  very 
concrete  demands  of  skill  that  paying  industry 
will  make  upon  him. 

This  is  the  dilemma.  If  the  organization  of 
vocational  training  is  left  in  charge  of  the  rep- 
resentatives of  the  employers,  educators  fear, 
and  fear  rightly,  that  the  first  result  will  ensue. 
If  it  is  left  exclusively  in  the  hands  of  educa- 
tors, the  employers  fear  the  other  danger.  Vo- 
cational education  in  this  country  has,  there- 
fore, run  its  uncertain  course  through  experi- 
ments in  continuation  schools,  ^^pre-vocational" 
courses  in  the  regular  schools,  trade  courses, 
'* cooperative"  courses,  until  a  certain  skepti- 
cism has  been  aroused  in  the  minds  of  profes- 
sional educators  and  the  interested  public 
whether  we  can  institute  a  workable  system  at 
all  in  our  present  public  school.  Skepticism 
has  meant  hesitation.  In  spite  of  the  propa- 
ganda and  survey  work  of  an  influential  society 
of  educators,  employers  and  labor  men — ^the 
National  Society  for  the  Promotion  of  Indus- 
trial Education — progress  has  been  very  slow. 
Only  eight  states  have  provided  for  the  encour- 
agement of  vocational  education  and  in  only  one 


176         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

is  continuation  schooling  compulsory.  The 
whole  movement  has  needed  some  very  definite 
concentrated  stimulus  and  some  new,  clear  fo- 
cusing of  the  issues. 

This  is  the  real  value  of  the  new  federal  bill. 
If  it  is  negligible  in  its  actual  power  for  aid,  its 
indirect  effects  should  be  of  great  importance 
in  the  way  of  stimulus.  It  will  undoubtedly 
suggest  to  the  majority  of  states  the  immediate 
establishment  of  a  comprehensive  system  of 
continuation  schools.  The  grants  will  be  just 
large  enough  to  make  it  seem  possible.  They 
are  not  nearly  large  enough  to  exempt  the  states 
from  local  appropriations.  According  to  the 
federal  bill  these  must  duplicate  the  federal 
grants.  The  latter  will  therefore  mean  actual 
additional  resources,  an  increment  to  local  and 
state  appropriations.  If  the  states  are  wise, 
and  appropriate  this  increment  to  the  payment 
and  training  of  teachers,  then  these  small  sums 
may  be  made  to  mean  just  the  difference  be- 
tween the  present  hardly  attained  mediocrity  of 
vocational  teaching  and  a  new  and  effective  type 
of  artisan-instructors. 

The  bill  puts  the  distribution  of  the  funds  in 
the  hands  of  such  state  boards  as  the  legisla- 
tures shall  designate.    The  latter  may  desig- 


VOCATIONAL  EDUCATION        177 

nate  the  regular  state  board  of  education,  or  a 
special  board  of  industrial  education  working 
under  the  direction  of  the  regular  board,  or  it 
may  create  a  new  and  independent  board  to 
handle  these  funds.  No  state  is  likely  to  trifle 
with  this  now  thoroughly  discredited  ^^dual" 
system  originally  sponsored  in  Illinois  under 
the  form  of  separate  boards  controlled  wholly 
by  employing  interests.  The  practical  choice 
will  lie  between  the  purely  ** educational"  con- 
trol and  the  mixed  educational,  industrial  and 
labor  control,  such  as  exists  in  Wisconsin.  The 
objection  to  the  former  grows  persistently  on 
the  ground  that  the  new  vocational  methods  and 
work  tend  infallibly  in  the  hands  of  the  pro- 
fessional educator  to  drift  back  to  the  academic. 
Educators  have  too  often  shown  a  willingness 
either  to  divorce  the  ^^pre-vocational"  work  en- 
tirely from  the  regular  school,  or  else  to  emas- 
culate it  of  its  realistic  potency.  Instead  of 
seeing  the  new  practical  emphasis  infusing  and 
reinvigorating  the  regular  primary  and  second- 
ary school,  the  enthusiast  for  the  ^^new''  edu- 
cation has  too  often  had  to  watch  merely  the 
slow  reduction  of  the  vocational  work  to  the  old 
unimaginative  level  of  ^^ manual  training.'^ 
The  question  of  control,  therefore,  which  the 


178         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

new  bill  puts  indirectly  to  the  states  is  of  the 
greatest  moment,  both  to  the  traditional  type  of 
school  and  to  the  new  activities.  The  board 
that  distributes  the  funds  will  in  the  last  analy- 
sis control  the  policy.  Certainly  the  conserva- 
tism of  the  professional  educator  is  far  less  to 
be  feared  than  the  narrowness  and  self-interest 
of  employers'  associations.  In  following  the 
provisions  of  the  federal  bill  that  the  aided 
schools  shall  be  below  college  grade,  for  chil- 
dren over  fourteen,  the  state  board  will  control 
the  standards  of  the  individual  schools.  Which- 
ever form  of  control  is  adopted,  the  trend  to- 
wards state  centralization  of  the  school  system 
is  likely  to  be  greatly  strengthened. 

In  this  development  the  states  will  be  influ- 
enced largely  by  the  experience  of  Wisconsin 
and  Massachusetts,  where  the  continuation 
schools,  part-time  schools,  apprentice  classes, 
which  the  bill  encourages,  have  been  longest  in 
operation.  The  Wisconsin  experience  will  be 
found  particularly  instructive.  The  state  sub- 
sidizes its  vocational  schools  by  duplicating  the 
funds  raised  by  the  community  under  an  obliga- 
tory half -mill  tax.  The  local  schools  are  under 
the  control  of  a  special  board  of  industrial  edu- 
cation appointed  by  the  local  board  of  educa- 


VOCATIONAL  EDUCATION        179 

tion,  and  consisting  of  the  superintendent  of 
schools  with  two  labor  representatives  and  two 
employers.  The  distribution  of  the  state  funds, 
is  in  the  hands  of  the  regular  state  educational 
administration.  There  is  an  advisory  industrial 
board  of  similar-composition  to  the  local  boards. 
At  present  the  situation  is  much  confused  owing 
to  the  reluctance  of  this  state  board  of  industrial 
education  to  remain  merely  advisory.  A  **  de- 
veloper" has  been  appointed  as  its  secretary, 
an  expert  in  the  field,  but  without  administra- 
tive power  over  the  schools.  His  attempts  at 
acceleration  have  produced  their  inevitable  and 
intense  resentment  among  the  regular  school  of- 
ficials. Obviously  such  a  system,  with  two 
boards  contending  for  mastery,  creates  an  im- 
possible situation.  With  the  exception  of  this 
— and  the  actual  effect  of  this  very  largely  per- 
sonal and  political  feud  upon  the  local  develop- 
ment seems  to  have  been  negligible — the  Wis- 
consin system  seems  to  be  based  on  sound 
principles.  The  local  industrial  boards  have 
worked  with  effectiveness  and  responsibility. 
In  Milwaukee  a  remarkable  system  of  continua-\ 
tion  schools  has  been  built  up,  which  provides  ) 
for  no  less  than  eight  thousand  children  between 
the  ages  of  fourteen  and  seventeen,  children 


180         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

whom  the  pubUc  and  parochial  schools  have 
sloughed  off  into  *' blind-alley '^  work,  and  at 
whose  education  and  guidance  the  city  makes  a 
la?it  stab  in  the  four-hour-a-week  continuation 
school.    One  definite  principle  these  Milwaukee 
schools  seem  to  have  established — ^that  educa- 
tion must  not  be  ^^preparatory''  to  work,  that 
there  is  no  real  place  for  the  merely  **pre-voca- 
tional,"  but  that  education  should  accompany 
work  and  do  that  just  as  long  as  there  is  any- 
thing to  learn.    The  ideal  vocational  education 
will  be  a  liberal  ^^ part-time"  education,  in  which 
the  school  furnishes  the  background  and  the 
constant  opening  of  new  suggestions  and  possi- 
bilities, and  the  shop  or  trade  or  office  provides 
the  arena  for  acting  skilfully  on  what  is  learned. 
The  Wisconsin  system  is  particularly  sugges- 
tive.   For  the  local  boards  constitute  one  of  our 
first  American  attempts  at  representation  by 
interest  instead  of  political  parties   or  arbi- 
trary geographical  divisions.    Their  success  is 
largely  ascribed  in  Wisconsin  to  this  fact,  that 
they  do   accurately  represent  just  the  three 
classes  most  concerned  in  this  form  of  education 
— organized  labor,  the  employers,  and  the  pro- 
fessional schoolman.    The  labor  representatives 
are  on  the  board  to  see  that  the  policy  does  not 


VOCATIONAL  EDUCATION        181 

sA^ing  over  to  narrow  employing  interests,  the 
employers  are  on  the  board  to  see  that  the 
school  is  kept  in  touch  with  the  practical  de- 
mands of  industry.  The  professional  educator 
holds  the  balance  of  power  between  these  two 
interests.  With  this  administrative  develop- 
ment to  build  on,  with  the  improvement  in  teach- 
ing caliber  that  the  new  federal  grants  should 
bring,  with  the  state  centralization  of  the  school 
system  to  which  the  new  bill  will  give  impetus, 
the  future  is  good  for  a  national  system  of  edu- 
cation for  work  and  with  work,  a  free  and  demo- 
cratic vocational  training. 


XXII 

AN   ISSUE  IN   VOCATIONAL   EDUCATION 

NOTHINGr  is  more  significant  of  the  new 
spirit  in  public  education  than  our  use  of 
the  term  ^^ vocational  training.''  It  strikes  out 
at  a  blow  the  old  antithesis  between  the  cul- 
tural and  the  utilitarian.  For  a  genuine  voca- 
tion implies  neither  a  life  devoted  to  thought, 
nor  a  dull  mechanical  job  to  which  personal  and 
artistic  and  intellectual  interests  are  mere  trim- 
mings— recreations  which  can  be  easily  omitted 
by  those  who  cannot  afford  to  pay  for  them.  A 
vocation  is  rather  a  nucleus  of  any  kind  of  in- 
teresting activity  by  which  one  earns  one 's 
living,  and  around  which  whatever  else  comes 
to  one's  experience  clusters  to  enhance  its  value 
and  interest.  It  is  not  fantastic  to  hope  that 
the  very  demands  of  modern  industrial 
technique  will  make  of  most  trades  just  such 
nuclei.  When  we  justify  trade-schools  and  in- 
dustrial courses  by  the  existence  of  law  and 
medical  and  engineering  schools,  we  are  imply- 

182 


VOCATIONAL  EDUCATION         183 

ing  that  the  skilled  worker  in  modern  industry- 
can  and  should  lead  a  life  as  genuinely  ^*  pro- 
fessional" as  the  lawyer  and  doctor  and  en- 
gineer. 

New  York  City  has  at  the  present  time  (June, 
1915)  a  unique  opportunity  to  meet  these  im- 
portant issues.  In  no  other  city  has  the  ques- 
tion been  so  squarely  presented.  New  York  has 
to  choose  between  what  is  called  the  Ettinger 
plan,  put  into  operation  by  a  local  superintend- 
ent to  solve  '^part-time"  and  vocational  training 
problems,  and  the  Gary  plan,  as  worked  out  by 
William  Wirt  and  now  on  trial  under  his  per- 
sonal direction  in  several  of  the  New  York 
schools.  In  that  choice  may  be  indicated  the 
tendencies  and  purposes  of  industrial  education 
in  this  country. 

The  Ettinger  plan  emphasizes  in  the  sharpest 
way  the  difference  between  *' cultural"  and  ^^in- 
dustrial" work.  The  child  chooses  between 
them  in  his  sixth  or  seventh  year  of  school.  If 
economic  pressure  is  going  to  force  him  into' 
manual  work,  he  is  allowed  to  try  a  number  of 
different  trades  in  the  school  industrial  shops 
in  order  to  discover  what  he  is  best  fitted  for. 
This  hasty  experimentation  has  received  the 
schoolman's  label  of  ^^prevocational."    Hav- 


184         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

ing  chosen  his  trade,  the  young  worker  spe- 
cializes in  the  shop,  under  conditions  as  nearly 
as  possible  like  the  trade,  continuing  in  trade- 
school  or  technical  high  school,  or  in  the  in- 
dustry under  a  cooperative  scheme,  as  in  the 
German  schools.  His  academic  studies,  as  far 
as  they  are  continued,  are  of  a  severely  practi- 
cal character,  theory  and  science  being  used 
merely  to  explain  the  industrial  processes  which 
he  is  learning.  The  ideal  is  a  specialized 
school,  gradually  breaking  off  from  the  tradi- 
tional one  and  developing  radically  different 
methods  and  interests.  The  object  of  the  in- 
dustrial course  is  to  turn  out  a  competent  work- 
man who  has  escaped  the  blind  occupations  of 
those  who  leave  school  at  the  minimum  age. 

The  school  under  this  plan  may  give  the  child 
an  elementary  industrial  training,  with  an  in- 
tellectual orientation  better  than  he  could  get 
under  any  system  of  apprenticeship,  but  it  can 
scarcely  be  said  to  give  a  vocational  training. 
The  Ettinger  plan  treats  the  child  solely  as  a 
potential  workman  who  is  to  be  absorbed  as  a 
permanent  subordinate  in  one  specialized  trade 
of  a  rigidly  organized  industrial  system.  It 
makes  of  the  school  a  mere  downward  extension 
of  the  staple  trades  and  machine  industries,  a 


VOCATIONAL  EDUCATION         185 

sort  of  kmdergarten  where  the  employer  gets 
his  workmen  trained,  free  of  cost  to  himself. 
It  quite  ignores  any  other  roles  the  young 
worker  may  be  called  upon  to  play  in  society — 
as  citizen  or  as  member  of  an  economic  class. 
It  makes  an  undemocratic  class-division  in  the 
public  school,  and  by  divorcing  the  academic 
from  the  industrial  work  gives  to  both  the  wrong 
setting. 

The  Gary  plan,  on  the  other  hand,  prepares 
for  a  genuinely  vocational  life.  It  views  the 
world  outside  the  school  not  as  a  collection  of 
trades  but  as  a  community,  a  network  of  occu- 
pations and  interests,  of  interweaving  services, 
intellectual,  administrative,  manual.  It  sees 
the  individual  as  a  citizen  who  contributes  his 
share  to  the  community  and  pays  for  the  things 
he  enjoys.  The  school  itself  is  organized  as 
a  community,  self-supporting  industrially  and 
as  varied  in  its  work,  study  and  play  as  is  thd 
larger  community.  The  industrial  work  is 
made  an  indispensable  part  of  the  maintenance 
and  enhancement  of  this  school  community  life. 
The  Gary  child  begins  in  his  third  or  fourth 
school  year  as  helper  in  a  shop  or  laboratory 
that  interests  him.  If  he  is  to  work  at  a  trade 
after  he  leaves  school,  he  gets  a  long  and  thor- 


186         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

ough  training  under  real  workmen  in  the  school 
shops  engaged  in  the  repair  and  maintenance 
of  the  school-plant.  He  is  at  no  time  called 
upon  to  choose  between  the  ^'academic"  and 
the  ^ industrial.''  His  work  is  a  focusing  of 
all  the  interests  of  the  school,  and  the  attitudes 
developed  in  the  school  are  bound  to  be  carried 
into  productive  life  and  to  give  a  new  setting 
to  the  business  of  making  a  livelihood.  Science, 
apart  from  the  light  it  throws  upon  the  arti- 
san's trade,  is  bound  to  mean  something  to 
him,  for  in  the  Gary  school  it  has  answered  his 
questions  about  the  physical  world  around  him. 
History  and  geography  and  sociology  and  eco- 
nomics are  likely  to  mean  something  because 
they  have  answered  questions  about  the  social 
institutions  and  the  relations  of  men.  Art  and 
music  will  continue  to  interest  him  because  they 
have  been  an  integral  part  of  the  school  life. 
The  Gary  plan  would  tend  to  produce  not  only 
a  skilled  workman  but  a  critical  citizen,  ready, 
like  the  energetic  professional  man,  to  affect  the 
standards  and  endeavors  of  his  profession  and 
the  community  life. 

The  Ettinger  plan  is  as  economically  unsound 
as   it   is   pedagogically   unsound.     It   requires 


VOCATIONAL  EDUCATION         187 

special  teachers,  and  expensive  shops  which  are 
unproductive.  Without  state  or  federal  sub- 
sidies, the  cost  of  any  extensive  or  even  ade- 
quate industrial  training  in  trade-school  or  ele- 
mentary school  will  continue  to  be  prohibitive. 
The  Gary  plan,  which  connects  the  school  shops 
directly  with  the  repair  and  maintenance  of  the 
school-plant,  demands  and  can  afford  a  much 
greater  variety  of  shops  than  the  ordinary 
school.  And  since  the  workmen-teachers  earn 
their  salaries  by  their  work,  the  children  get 
their  industrial  training  practically  without  cost 
to  the  community.  By  the  Gary  plan  the  voca- 
tional training  features  are  only  practicable  if 
all  the  other  liberally  varied  '* cultural' '  fea- 
tures are  put  into  operation  at  the  same  time. 
This  effectually  prevents  that  '^exploitation" 
of  the  children  which  its  opponents  fear  because 
the  young  workers  get  their  training  as  **  ap- 
prentices" in  the  school  shops. 

Many  who  admit  the  superior  social  aims  of 
the  Gary  plan  are  inclined  to  feel  that  the  prac- 
tical results  of  the  two  plans  will  not  be  radi- 
cally different.  But  the  Gary  plan  and  the 
Ettinger  plan  are  not  merely  two  different  ways 
of  reaching  the  same  end.     They  not  only  in- 


188         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

volve  different  conceptions  of  the  school  and  of 
industrial  society,  but  they  are  bound  to  turn 
out  different  kinds  of  people. 
/  The  Ettinger  plan  is  dangerous  because  it  is 
typical  of  most  schemes  now  being  put  for- 
ward by  the  advocates  of  industrial  education. 
These  plans  are  concerned  neither  with  genu- 
ine educational  interests  nor  with  genuine  in- 
dustrial interests,  but  only  with  the  interest  of 
the  employer.  No  person  who  feels  that  the 
public  schools  should  train  critical  citizens  who 
will  have  something  to  say  to  the  industrial 
system  into  which  they  go,  and  not  mere  docile 
workers,  counting  socially  no  more  than  their 
tools,  will  fail  to  realize  the  vast  importance 
that  the  Gary  plan  should  prevail  over  all  these 
schemes. 


XXIII 

OEGANIZED  LABOR  ON  EDUCATION 

AT  a  recent  labor  conference  in  New  York 
City,  May,  1916,  called  to  present  a  pro- 
gram for  the  local  public  schools,  Mr.  Gompers 
expressed  himself  as  open-minded  towards  the 
Gary  plan  which  is  about  to  be  extended  to 
thirty-five  more  New  York  schools.  This  open- 
mindedness  of  Mr.  Gompers  is  in  welcome  and 
significant  contrast  to  the  attitude  taken  by  some 
of  the  smaller  leaders  in  the  city,  who  have  ap- 
parently tried  to  line  up  organized  labor  with  a 
personal  political  machine  and  with  reactionary 
schoolmen  in  obstructing  the  reorganization  of 
the  elementary  schools.  But  organized-Jabor 
has  better  business  than  opposing  educatipniil 
reform,  and  Mr.  Gompers 's  remarks,  made  with 
full  responsibility  and  in  direct  opposition  to 
the  thinly-veiled  partisan  spirit  of  the  confer- 
ence, suggest  that  the  responsible  leaders  of 
labor  are  willing  to  take  a  more  enlightened 
stand  in  this  important  movement. 

189 


190         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

Organized  labor  has  repeatedly  gone  on  rec- 
ord in  favor  of  a  public  school  system  which 
will  train  a  labor  citizenry  so  versatile  and  in- 
telligent as  to  be  able  to  protect  itself  from  ex- 
ploitation and  the  hazards  of  our  social  shift- 
lessness.  It  has  demanded  that  vocational 
teaching  be  kept  intimately  related  to  life,  so 
that  children  come  out  from  the  school  neither 
helpless  unskilled  workers  nor  narrow  machine- 
tenders,  but  potential  citizens  acquainted  with 
the  backgrounds  of  their  crafts,  with  the  sig- 
nificance of  the  labor  movement  and  the  insti- 
tutions and  movements  of  the  world  about  them. 
Labor  above  all  classes  has  a  vital  interest  in 
an  education  for  all  children  which  acknowl- 
edges the  full  intellectual  and  social  meanings 
of  industrial  processes  and  occupations.  The 
education  that  labor  desires  is  one  which  will 
give,  particualarly  to  those  who  engage  in  in- 
dustrial callings,  the  desire  and  ability  to  share 
in  social  control,  and  to  become  masters  of  their 
industrial  fate. 

Now  organized  labor  must  be  rapidly  com- 
ing to  see  that  this  demand  will  never  be  satis- 
fied by  the  conventional  type  of  city  public 
school.  A  traditional  school  founded  on  the 
bookish  education  of  a  leisure  class  can  never 


OEGANIZED  LABOR  191 

be  made  into  a  pre-voeational  school  that  will 
give  power  and  dignity  to  labor,  without  a 
fundamental  transformation  of  the  present 
spirit,  subject-matter  and  teaching  methods. 
An  elementary  school  which  gives  its  children 
no  more  than  narrow  drill  in  the  three  E's  plus 
a  little  remote  and  unreal  text-book  information 
in  history  and  geography,  with  what  little  half- 
hearted music  and  drawing  and  nature-study 
can  be  squeezed  in,  will  never  provide  the  foun- 
dation that  the  trained  worker  will  need.  No 
system  of  trade-training  or  vocational  educa- 
tion superimposed  upon  such  an  elementary 
school  will  remedy  the  evils.  Children  who 
have  been  listlessly  and  ineffectively  drilled  in 
book-work  will  have  acquired  attitudes  that  are 
likely  to  be  carried  over  into  vocational  work. 
Except  for  the  few,  industrial  training  will  seem 
sheer  drudgery,  for  it  will  have  its  roots  in  no 
interests  and  powers  developed  in  earlier  years. 
Pre-vocational  education  must  mean  something 
more  than  a  mere  sop  to  the  motor-minded  boys 
and  girls  who  are  restless  with  their  books  and 
are  on  the  verge  of  leaving  school  for  work. 
Such  training,  if  it  is  to  mean  anything,  must 
be  woven  in  as  an  organic  part  of  the  school 
course.     The  entire  elementary  school  could  be 


192         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

a  general,  free,  spontaneous,  amateur  pre-voca- 
tional  school,  where  in  direct  contact  with  ma- 
chines and  industrial  processes  as  well  as  books, 
with  gardens  and  gymnasiums  as  well  as  labora- 
tories and  kitchens,  with  tools  and  print  and 
pottery  shops  and  drawing  and  music  studios, 
children  might  have  their  imaginations  stirred, 
try  out  their  busy  hands  on  things,  and  gradu- 
ally sift  out  of  the  variety  the  interests  that 
they  can  lay  hold  on  with  some  promise  of  cre- 
ative use.  The  school  might  be  a  place  where 
play  passed  insensibly  into  work,  and  aimless 
experiment  into  purposeful  construction. 

Most  of  the  current  criticism  of  the  public 
schools  arises  from  the  rapidly  growing  convic- 
tion that  only  in  such  a  school  will  the  modern 
city  child  have  a  chance  to  be  educated  in  any 
way  which  will  meet  the  demands  in  industrial 
or  commercial  life  that  will  be  made  upon  him. 
There  is  danger  in  current  educational  experi- 
ments that  we  become  too  easily  satisfied  with 
the  mere  addition  of  desirable  courses,  without 
at  the  same  time  transforming  the  school  so  that 
the  new  work  is  organically  assimilated.  Labor 
I  cannot  be  content  with  the  school  reform  which 
many  cities  are  adopting  in  the  introduction  of 
vocational  courses  merely  in  the  upper  grades. 


ORGANIZED  LABOR  193 

Such  a  postponement  means  an  invidions  class- 
distinction  in  those  grades  between  the  children 
who  are  going  on  to  academic  work  and  those 
who  are  going  on  to  industrial  work.  It  broad- 
ens the  gulf  between  labor  and  leisure  rather 
than  diminishes  it.  Labor  should  be  the  first  to 
protest  against  these  ^^pre-vocational  courses," 
^^ junior  high  school  plans,"  as  they  are  vari- 
ously called.  A  school  which  consists  merely 
of  six  years  of  bookish  schooling  with  trade- 
learning  and  athletics  tacked  on  at  the  top  would 
merely  intensify  the  evils  under  which  labor 
now  suffers.  It  would  produce  mechanical 
drudges.  It  would  almost  guarantee  that  in- 
dustrially exploitable  horde  of  young  workers 
the  creation  of  which  organized  labor  so  much 
fears. 

In  advocating  such  a  system  the  lesser  labor 
chiefs  in  New  York  have  been  very  badly  ad- 
vised. The  program  of  ^ '  immediate  demands, ' ' 
put  forth  under  Mr.  Gompers's  nose  with  a 
great  flourish  of  the  rights  of  labor,  is  not  only  i 
unprogressive  but  actually  reactionary.  It  is* 
exactly  the  kind  of  specious  program  that  the 
narrow-minded  employer  might  demand  who 
wished  a  docile  but  intelligent  labor  force 
trained  at  the  public  expense.    In  whose  in- 


194         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

terest  does  labor  demand  the  **  immediate  elimi- 
nation from  the  course  of  study  of  any  activity 
which  takes  away  from  the  essentials  and  funda- 
mentals of  education  in  the  elementary 
schools?'^  To  eliminate  organized  play,  audi- 
torium dramatics,  shopwork,  gardening,  danc- 
ing, etc.,  is  surely  the  best  way  to  drive  children 
out  of  school,  or  to  train  them  into  mere  ap- 
pendages to  machines.  "What  labor  needs  is  the 
most  varied  kind  of  work-study-and-play  school, 
where  imagination  and  interest  are  awakened. 
Yet  here  we  find  a  conference  on  organized 
labor  and  education  demanding  simply  more  of 
the  old  kind  of  traditional  schools !  What  good 
will  it  do  to  have  more  school  buildings,  more 
teachers,  more  pay  for  teachers,  even  more 
night-schools  and  playgrounds,  if  the  schools 
merely  pursue  the  old  limited  grind?  Labor 
needs  a  school  enriched  in  opportunity  and 
vitalized  with  the  modern  spirit  of  *^  learning 
by  doing,"  yet  all  it  can  think  of  to  demand  is 
I  *  ^  a  seat  for  every  child ' ' !  And  to  ram  home  to 
the  public  a  sense  of  its  straitened  vision, 
this  conference  records  its  ^^  emphatic  protest 
against  any  further  extension  of  the  Gary 
plan. ' ' 
Now  opposition  to  the  Gary  plan  may  be  a 


ORGANIZED  LABOR  195 

useful  attitude  for  the  lesser  labor  leaders  who 
are  playing  for  political  stakes,  but  we  cannot 
believe  that  this  is  the  attitude  of  the  intelligent 
elements  in  the  labor  movement.  For  what  the 
Gary  plan  does  is  exactly  to  make  possible  for 
the  first  time  on  a  large  public  scale  this  greatly 
enriched '  elementary  school  which  labor  needs 
for  the  realization  of  its  own  expressed  educa- 
tional ideals.  The  broad  curriculum,  the  flexi- 
bility which  adapts  the  school  to  the  needs  of 
every  child,  the  interweaving  work,  study  and 
play,  transform  the  traditional  school  into  a  kind 
of  child-community,  where  children  throughout 
the  course  are  laying  the  rudiments  of  their 
vocations.  They  have  a  chance  from  the  early 
years,  by  trial  and  error,  by  experiment  and 
realization,  to  find  out  what  they  can  do  and 
what  they  cannot  do.  To  quote  Superintendent 
Wirt,  the  Gary  school  is  educating  them  just  as 
the  home,  shop  and  school  teacher  educated  the 
children  of  earlier  American  days.  No  formal 
pre-vocational  course  begun  in  the  seventh  or 
eighth  year  can  do  what  this  simple  intimate 
contact  with  things  and  processes  does.  In  a 
sense,  industrial  education  may  begin  in  the 
Gary  school  as  soon  as  the  small  child  is  inter- 
ested in  going  into  the  school-shops  or  labora- 


196         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

tories  as  helper  or  observer.  All  the  activities 
may  be  tested  in  the  same  way.  The  school  is 
thoroughly  democratic  because  the  opportuni- 
ties, bookish,  manual,  artistic,  are  open  on  equal 
terms  to  all  the  children.  For  labor  to  oppose 
the  Gary  plan  means  that  labor  is  suicidally 
opposing  the  very  kind  of  school  that  holds  out 
the  most  opportunity  for  an  enriched  educa- 
tion for  its  children. 

Mr.  Gompers  and  the  other  responsible  lead- 
ers of  organized  labor  could  do  nothing  more 
important  than  make  an  immediate  and  thor- 
ough study  of  the  educational  promise  of  the 
Gary  school.  If  organized  labor  were  to  put 
itself  enthusiastically  behind  the  Gary  plan,  it 
would  have  at  once  an  enlightened  policy  on 
elementary  education  which  would  effectively 
prevent  any  insidious  exploitation  of  the  move- 
ment. It  would  be  well  if  the  responsible  lead- 
ers would  repudiate  these  lesser  labor  chiefs 
who  manipulate  education  for  political  pur- 
poses. The  time  has  come  for  a  bold  and  pro- 
gressive stand. 


XXIV 

EDUCATION   FOB  WORK 

THE  urgency  of  vocational  education  in  this 
country  has  been  immensely  reinforced 
during  the  past  few  years  by  the  rapidly  grow- 
ing social  solicitude  for  child  welfare.  Child- 
labor  laws,  compulsory  education,  minimum 
wage,  children's  courts,  welfare  bureaus,  de- 
vised primarily  as  mere  protective  agencies 
for  the  weaker  and  less  self-defensible  mem- 
bers of  the  community,  are  now  suddenly  seen 
to  involve  a  host  of  positive  social  responsi- 
bilities. We  are  recognizing  that  the  state  has 
a  duty  not  only  to  save  the  younger  generation 
from  exploitation,  premature  labor  and  de- 
moralizing environments,  but  also  to  give  it 
every  possible  opportunity  to  be  trained  for  an 
effective  vocation.  In  particular,  the  recent 
raising  of  the  age  limit  for  child  labor  in  many 
of  the  states,  by  keeping  in  school  thousands  of 
children  who  would  otherwise  have  passed  out 
to  work,  has  put  a  great  strain  upon  the  public 

197 


198         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

school.  The  challenge  so  far  has  done  little 
else  than  make  evident  an  alarming  inadequacy 
of  the  present  type  of  school  to  train  children 
for  the  work  which  they  will  shortly  be  called 
upon  to  do.  The  school  systems  of  the  large 
northern  cities  are  having  thrust  upon  them 
great  numbers  of  children  for  whose  education, 
in  this  new  sense  of  the  word,  they  are  unpre- 
pared. And  the  burden  and  urgency  is  one  that 
"  will  increase  rather  than  diminish. 

This  is  one  of  the  lessons  of  a  document  like 
the  recent  admirable  report  of  the  Minneapolis 
Survey  for  Vocational  Education,  made  last 
year  under  the  auspices  of  the  National  Society 
for  the  Promotion  of  Industrial  Education.  It 
would  be  difficult  to  advise  reading  more  im- 
portant for  educator,  employer  and  employee 
than  this  cross-section  of  the  skilled-labor  life  of 
a  great  American  city,  looked  at  with  a  view  to 
vocational  guidance.  In  Minneapolis  all  the 
conditions  were  at  their  best  for  such  a  social 
laboratory  experiment.  The  rapid  growth  of 
manufacturing  and  the  unusually  high  propor- 
tion of  skilled  industries  make  the  demand  for 
the  training  of  workers  paramount.  The  strin- 
gent state  laws  require  attendance  at  the  school 
until  the  age  of  sixteen  or  the  completion  of  the 


EDUCATION  FOR  WORK  199 

entire  elementary  course.  The  city  has  a  school 
system  of  high  traditional  excellence.  Clearly 
all  the  factors  that  would  stimulate  a  campaign 
for  vocational  education  are  here  in  their  most 
exacting  form. 

The  analysis  here  given  of  the  training  which 
the  manufacturing  and  mechanical  industries 
require  for  their  various  skilled  positions,  the 
training  which  public  schools  and  special  schools 
are  purporting  to  give,  the  increase  in  resources 
which  school  and  shop  will  have  to  make  to  meet 
the  social  demands  made  upon  them — all  this 
will  be  found  typical  in  greater  or  less  degree 
throughout  the  country.  The  most  general  im- 
pression one  gets  from  the  Survey  is  of  indus- 
trial unpreparedness.  The  public  school  is  seen 
not  with  its  usual  fault  as  an  institution  of  gen- 
eral education  which  has  ignored  pre-vocational 
needs,  but  as  a  pre-vocational  school  of  narrow 
and  exclusive  type,  for  the  vocational  training 
of  the  classes  in  the  community  whose  actual 
need  was  least.  For  above  the  earlier  years  of 
rudimentary  schooling  there  has  been  superim- 
posed a  bookish  school  which  is  really  a  pre- 
vocational  school  for  the  professions  or  for 
domestic  leisure.  The  boys  and  girls  whose 
futures  were  to  be  professional  and  domestic 


200         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

had  the  benefit  of  the  public  school.  The  vast 
majority,  the  motor-minded  and  those  whose 
aptitudes  were  not  intellectual,  very  properly 
and  automatically  left  this  bookish  school  as  soon 
as  they  had  obtained  their  rudimentary  gen- 
eral education.  When  the  state  suddenly  re- 
fuses to  allow  these  children  to  leave  the 
school  until  they  have  finished  the  ele- 
mentary course,  the  school  system  is  faced 
with  the  necessity  of  broadening  itself  from 
a  narrow  pre-vocational  school  for  the  pro- 
fessions into  a  pre-vocational  school  for 
all  the  industries  and  arts  of  the  modern 
community.  The  smatterings  of  wood-working 
and  domestic  science  which  the  city  schools  have 
introduced  are  shown  not  to  have  broadened 
the  school  in  the  least.  Even  the  technical 
courses  in  the  high  schools  have  quite  failed  to 
meet  the  problem.  Of  the  recent  graduates 
from  these  courses  in  the  Minneapolis  schools 
it  is  shown  that  one-half  went  directly  to  col- 
lege, only  one-tenth  passing  into  occupations  for 
which  the  course  could  in  any  way  be  regarded 
as  preparatory.  Most  of  these  students,  more- 
over, went  into  drafting  rooms.  It  may  be  said 
therefore  that  to  the  training  of  the  great  arti- 
san class  of  such  a  modern  and  progressive 


EDUCATION  FOR  WORK  201 

city  the  public  schools  have  contributed  practi- 
cally nothing.  A  typically  American  progres- 
sive school  system  with  all  its  technical  and 
manual  accessories  is  shown  functioning  at  its 
v.ery  highest  limit  as  a  pre-vocational  school,  not 
for  skilled  labor,  but  for  the  professions  and 
what  the  Survey  suggestively  calls  the  ^^com- 
missioned officers  of  industry." 

The  industries  themselves,  however,  are 
found  to  be  no  more  adequately  engaged  than 
the  school  in  training  their  own  workers.  Ap- 
prenticeship has  all  but  died  out,  and  among 
neither  employers  nor  employees  is  there  any 
enthusiasm  for  its  return.  Yet,  although  all 
the  trades  require  a  constant  supply  of  trained 
workers,  no  substitute  has  yet  been  found  for 
apprenticeship.  The  movement  for  industrial 
education  has  at  times  seemed  like  an  attempt 
of  employers  to  get  their  skilled  workers  trained 
at  public  expense.  The  effort  to  establish 
separate  boards  in  the  cities  for  industrial  edu- 
cation threatened  to  limit  such  training  to  the 
narrow  skill  which  each  industry  would  demand 
and  to  supply  employers  with  apprentices  at  no 
cost  to  the  industry  itself.  Fortunately  the 
Minneapolis  Survey  warns  against  this  narrow 
and  sinister  conception  of  vocational  education. 


202         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

Industrial  interests  cannot  shirk  the  responsi- 
bility for  the  special  training  of  their  workers. 
The  rapid  growth  of  '^ corporation  schools" 
shows  that  at  least  the  most  prosperous 
and  highly  skilled  shops  and  factories  are  ac- 
cepting this  responsibility.  All  the  employer 
has  a  right  to  demand  is  that  the  school  give 
the  young  worker  a  general  pre-vocational 
training  which  will  introduce  him  to  the  special 
trade  work.  The  graduate  of  the  elementary 
school  should  have  been  through  a  well  rounded 
course  which  not  only  cultivated  a  general  in- 
telligence, but  discovered,  by  submitting  him 
to  many  different  kinds  of  activity,  his  parti- 
cular flair  or  knack,  and  thus  enlisted  his  in- 
terest in  further  training  for  a  particular  vo- 
cation. 

The  elementary  school  should,  in  other  words, 
be  a  general  pre-vocational  school,  where  the 
boy  or  girl  could  get  a  bearing  towards  every 
type  of  vocation.  The  Survey  strikingly  con- 
firms the  far-sighted  vision  of  William  Wirt 
and  his  unspecialized  and  varied  Gary  school 
in  which  the  children  from  their  earliest  years 
are  testing  out  their  powers  in  shop  and  foun- 
dry and  laboratory  and  studio  and  classroom. 
^'What  is  needed,"  it  says,  '4s  not  a  course  in 


EDUCATION  FOE  WORK  203 

special  woodworking — the  extent  of  manual 
work  in  most  elementary  schools  of  the  present 
time — 'but  rather  organized  training  in  practi- 
cal arts  which  will  include  a  variety  of  experi- 
ences fundamental  to  the  life  of  the  community. 
Woodwork,  metal  work,  printing  and  bookbind- 
ing, clay  modeling,  concrete  and  electrical 
work,  are  some  of  the  industries  which  give  an 
opportunity  for  experience  in  certain  funda- 
mental processes  which  are  most  valuable  to 
boys  without  respect  to  the  occupation  in  which 
they  may  later  engage.'' 

In  the  last  year  of  the  elementary  school,  or 
in  the  years  of  the  junior  high  school,  more 
specialized  technical  courses  could  be  intro- 
duced. For  the  advanced  work,  more  and  more 
responsibility  should  be  thrown  on  the  shop, 
the  school  providing  the  background  of  theory, 
the  shop  the  practical  application,  and  the  stu- 
dent alternating  between  shop  and  school  as  in 
the  so-called  cooperative  course.  For  the  work- * 
ers  already  engaged,  part-time  continuation 
classes  are  advised,  with  '* dull-season  classes," 
and  evening  trade-extension  courses.  For 
these  the  various  special  schools  in  the  city, 
commercial  and  technical,  could  cooperate.  In 
this  correlation  of  shop  and  school  a  new  form 


204         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

of  apprenticeship  would  grow  up.  The  Survey 
reports  trade  agreements  already  worked  out 
in  several  trades  which  provide  that  after  two 
years  of  high-school  instruction  in  practical, 
technical  and  academic  subjects,  the  worker  will 
be  placed  in  the  occupation  at  wages  equal  to 
those  of  a  third-year  apprentice.  The  agree- 
ments require  the  approval  of  the  union,  and 
the  employers  agree  to  use  the  school  as  the 
first  source  of  supply  in  engaging  new  workers. 
On  some  such  constructive  lines  as  are  sug- 
gested in  this  Minneapolis  Survey  will  the  prob- 
lems of  vocational  education  be  worked  out. 
In  its  discussion  of  such  topics  as  home  gar- 
dening, office  work,  art  education,  domestic 
service,  the  Survey  suggests  the  breadth  of  the 
field  to  be  covered.  An  ideal  system  of  voca- 
tional training  would  not  only  give  every  boy 
and  girl  in  the  school  an  opportunity  to  find  an 
aptitude  and  cultivate  some  skill  but  it  would 
make  possible  the  training  of  *^  non-commis- 
sioned officers"  in  the  industrial  army.  The 
education  of  such  leaders  will  really  be  the  goal 
of  organized  vocational  education.  As  the  in- 
dustries, trades  and  occupations  become  more 
technical  and  more  scientifically  managed,  the 
demand  for  administrative,  supervisory,  direc- 


EDUCATION  FOE  WOEK  205 

tive  and  planning  officers  taken  from  the  ranks 
is  constantly  widening.    Efficient  management 
is  becoming  recognized  as  almost  the  most  im- 
portant factor  in  production,  and  management 
will  be  the  reward  for  intelligence  and  skill. 
Until  we  have  an  educational  system  which  m\ 
cooperation  with  shop  and  factory  gives  fullest  \ 
opportunities  for  each  child  in  the  schools  to 
work  towards  qualifying  as  such  a  ^^non-com- 
missioned officer"  in  some  occupation  of  the    , 
social  army,  we  shall  not  have  our  democratic    ■ 
school  or  our  framework  for  the  future  demo- 
cratization of  industry.    Nor  shall  we  be  able 
to  attack  those  mountainous  problems  of  un- 
skilled labor  which  no   system  of  vocational 
training  can  touch. 


XXV 

CONTINUATION   SCHOOLS 

THE  movement  for  vocational  education 
has  done  nothing  more  valuable  than  to 
show  us  how  far  we  are  still  from  realizing  the 
public  school  as  a  child-community,  first  of  all 
as  a  quickening  life  and  only  secondarily  as  an 
educational  institution.  The  rapidly  extending 
^^continuation  school''  is  perhaps  the  most  obvi- 
ous symptom  of  this  failure.  The  term  itself  is 
unfortunate,  for  it  drags  along  with  it  the  old 
separation  of  education  from  living.  It  sug- 
gests something  in  the  way  of  a  surplus,  of  ex- 
tension schooling  beyond  an  allotted  time,  as 
if  its  pupils  were  getting  an  educational  largess 
out  of  some  great  social  bounty.  Actually  the 
'^continuation  school"  represents  educational 
deficit;  the  necessity  for  it  registers  our  fail- 
ure to  provide  an  earlier  school-community  life 
for  children  which  would  have  kept  them  out  of 
industry.    Also  it  registers  our  failure  to  pro- 

206 


CONTINUATION  SCHOOLS         207 

vide  child-labor  laws  which  would  have  pro- 
tected them. 

The  continuation  school  is  officially  a  ^^  school 
for  employed  minors  fourteen  to  sixteen  years 
of  age, ' '  and  is  intended  to  hold,  by  the  tenuous 
thread  of  four  to  six  hours  a  week  school  at- 
tendance, those  boys  and  girls  who  have  gotten 
their  employment  certificates  at  the  earliest 
legal  age  and  are  floundering  about  in  low-paid 
occupations,  mostly  unskilled.  New  York  City 
alone  has  58,000  such  children,  fourteen  and 
fifteen  years  of  age,  two-thirds  of  whom  have 
never  completed  the  elementary  school.  Stores, 
offices,  shops,  domestic  service,  messenger  serv- 
ice absorb  these  boys  and  girls,  untrained  and 
unfocused,  and  the  truly  formidable  burden  is 
placed  upon  them  of  making  their  skilful  way 
in  the  world.  Popular  tradition  tries  to  make 
us  glow  with  the  belief  that  this  world  is  a 
ladder  up  which  virtue  and  industry  will  auto- 
matically ascend.  But  unfortunately  the  lad- 
der of  opportunity  rarely  reaches  down  so  far. 
The  lowest  rung  is  beyond  their  reach.  The 
gap  between  it  and  the  ground  is  often  too  great 
even  for  initiative  and  character  to  bridge. 
The  ^^  employed  minors  fourteen  to  sixteen 
years   of  age"  become  the  nucleus  for  that 


208         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

partly  employed,  sodden  and  anemic  mass  of 
drifters  which  drags  down  labor  everywhere 
and  clogs  social  progress. 

The  education  which  these  children  have  had 
has  in  most  cases  barely  fitted  them  to  remain 
upright  on  the  ground,  not  to  speak  of  reaching 
for  the  ladder.  The  acquirement  of  literacy, 
a  more  or  less  uncertain  skill  in  figuring,  the 
exposure  to  some  miscellaneous  historical  and 
geographical  information — ^this  has  been  the 
real  substance  of  their  five  or  six  years'  school- 
ing. To  most  of  these  children  it  is  probable 
that  the  world  of  printed  symbols  will  never 
mean  very  much.  A  real  school  would  have 
striven  to  awaken  their  concrete  and  construc- 
tive intelligence,  given  play  to  all  the  non- 
intellectual  impulses.  It  is  just  the  tedium  and 
artificiality  of  the  old  school  which  has  sen- 
tenced them  now  to  stand  at  the  bottom  of  the 
occupational  scale.  Without  class-prestige, 
economic  advantages,  manners,  extraordinary 
initiative  or  intelligence,  most  of  these  children 
are  handicapped  from  the  start.  Literate,  they 
are  perhaps  fitted  to  compete  on  equal  terms 
with  each  other  for  work.  But  for  the  passing 
into  better-paid,  more  interesting,  more  re- 
sponsible and  skilful  activity,  their  schooling, 


CONTINUATION  SCHOOLS         209 

though  it  came  at  the  most  plastic  and  active 
time  of  childhood,  has  done  nothing  whatever. 

We  try,  therefore,  through  the  ^^continuation 
school"  to  make  up  bravely  to  these  children 
what  they  have  lost.  We  try  to  lift  them  so 
that  they  can  clutch  at  the  lowest  rung  of  the 
ladder.  We  find  it  easier  to  make  stabs  at  re- 
pairing the  damage  than  to  reorganize  the  ele- 
mentary school  so  as  to  prevent  it.  In  Wis- 
consin cities  a  boy  or  girl  leaving  school  at 
fourteen  to  go  to  work  is  required  to  attend  day 
continuation  school  four  or  five  hours  a  week  for 
three  years.  In  Boston  the  children  must  attend 
for  four  hours  a  week  for  two  years.  In  Penn- 
sylvania cities  they  must  attend  eight  hours  a 
week  for  two  years.  Continuation  schools  for 
20,000  children  are  in  process  of  formation  by 
the  New  York  City  Board  of  Education.  Wis- 
consin's forty-five  industrial  and  continuation 
schools  are  compulsory,  while  in  the  other  states 
which  have  permissive  laws  the  schools  may  be 
made  locally  compulsory.  Employers  are  re- 
quired to  dismiss  their  child  employees  on  work- 
ing days  and  within  working  hours,  the  school 
time  being  reckoned  as  part  of  the  time  that 
minors  are  permitted  by  law  to  work. 

Such  laws  obviously  follow  the  line  of  least 


210         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

resistance.  They  add  to  the  school  system 
without  revitalizing  it.  At  the  same  time,  a 
scheme  like  the  Massachusetts  plan  suggests 
that  the  continuation  school  may  be  developed 
into  a  real  stimulus  of  incentive.  This  plan 
provides  for  three  kinds  of  classes.  For  those 
^* employed  minors''  who  are  already  in  semi- 
skilled work,  it  provides  some  training  and 
background  for  the  trade  or  occupation  chosen. 
There  are  also  trade  preparatory  classes  for 
pupils  who  have  definitely  chosen  the  trade 
for  which  they  wish  training,  but  have  not  yet 
found  placement  in  the  trade.  Then  there  are 
^^pre-vocational"  classes  for  those  who  are  am- 
bitious to  make  some  intelligent  choice  of  an  oc- 
cupation. These  pupils  are  given  varied  shop- 
work,  visits  to  shops  and  factories,  and  personal 
consultation  with  teachers  and  employers. 
Classes  are  small,  and  intensive  work  can  be 
done.  The  other  pupils,  employed  in  unskilled 
labor  and  without  definite  vocational  leanings, 
go  into  ^'general  improvement  courses,''  where 
half  the  time  is  spent  in  regular  school  subjects 
continuing  the  elementary  school  work ;  a  quar- 
ter of  the  time  is  devoted  to  ^'the  discovery 
and  development  of  dominant  interests  and 
powers,"  and  the  rest  of  the  time  to  what  is 


CONTINUATION  SCHOOLS         211 

quaintly  called  ^^  civics,  hygiene,  recreation  and 
culture."  In  this  latter  activity  one-quarter 
of  the  time  of  the  ^'pre-vocationaP'  and  trade 
courses  is  similarly  spent.  Pupils  may  trans- 
fer from  one  class  to  another  when  they  are 
ready.  If  the  purpose  of  the  continuation 
school  is  to  bridge  that  gap  between  the  ground 
and  the  level  where  opportunity  can  at  all  begin 
to  mean  anything,  this  Massachusetts  plan 
would  seem  to  do  it  in  an  easily  graduated  and 
flexible  way.  The  untrained  and  unfocused 
worker  has  at  least  a  chance  to  have  his  imagi- 
nation stimulated  and  to  learn  the  rudiments 
of  some  better  work. 

The  sanguine  advocates  of  the  continuation 
school,  however,  are  apt  to  assume  that  this 
chance  is  equivalent  to  an  effective  vocational 
training.  They  forget  that  of  the  10,000  or 
more  children  whom  Wisconsin  provides  with 
compulsory  continuation  schooling  a  majority 
must  necessarily  remain  in  the  general  im- 
provement classes  or  else  get  only  a  rudimen- 
tary training.  And  five  hours  a  week  for  edu- 
cation against  fifty  for  routine  labor  is  not 
likely  to  make  over  the  boys  and  girls  who  are 
pulled  into  the  school  for  a  brief  respite  from 
the  department  stores,  messenger  and  domestic 


212         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

service,  mills  and  factories,  millinery  and  dress- 
making shops.  Even  in  the  stimulating  Massa- 
chusetts atmosphere  one  hour  a  week  for  ^^  civ- 
ics, hygiene,  recreation  and  culture"  seems 
hardly  availing.  In  the  light  of  the  kind  of 
school-community  life  which  every  progress- 
ive state  now  knows  enough  to  provide  and 
could  afford  to  provide,  the  continuation  school 
seems  a  pathetic  if  necessary  palliative  for  our 
educational  sins.  Already  loud  complaints  are 
heard  against  ^^  allowing  the  public  school  to 
pass  on  its  failures  for  some  one  else  to  bury." 
The  first  lesson  of  the  continuation  school  is 
that  it  should  not  be  needed.  Even  employers 
repeatedly  declare  that  to  industry  children  un- 
der sixteen  are  of  no  real  value  as  workers. 
The  states  are  one  after  another  jacking  up 
their  child-labor  limit  to  sixteen  years.  We  are 
rapidly  coming  to  the  public  conviction  that  the 
school  should  care  for  all  children's  activity 
up  to  that  age.  What  the  continuation  school 
does  now  for  four  hours  a  week,  we  are  insist- 
ing that  the  regular  school  shall  do  for  thirty 
or  even  forty  hours  a  week. 

But  this  means  that  we  shall  have  to  have  a 
reinvigorated  school.  It  must  not  be  a  prison 
where  children  are  kept  when  they  long  for  the 


CONTINUATION  SCHOOLS         213 

freedom  of  outside  work.  It  must  be  a  place 
where  full  opportunity  for  expression  is  pro- 
vided for  each  child  in  a  varied  life  of  study 
and  work  and  play.  It  must  be  an  organic  life 
and  not  an  institution.  No  system  of  industrial 
and  continuation  schools  piled  on  at  the  top 
will  effect  this.  The  evening  school  has  largely 
failed  because  it  demanded  an  impossible  con- 
centration and  perseverance  from  the  over- 
fatigued  and  excitement-craving  worker.  The 
continuation  school,  dealing  with  restless  and 
unintegrated  children,  will  be  ineffective  for  the 
same  reason.  The  vocational  movement  goes 
blundering  on  in  amazing  disregard  of  the 
psychology  of  the  worker.  Even  the  docile 
German  child,  it  is  said,  must  be  coerced  into 
his  admirable  continuation  school  where  he  gets 
a  thorough  orientation  in  his  relations  to  his 
work,  the  community  and  his  comrades.  What 
are  admirable  trades  and  studies  going  to  mean 
to  boys  and  girls  who  are  doing  the  most  rudi- 
mentary work,  their  impulses  undirected,  their 
minds  filled  with  sex-fantasy,  personal  mirages, 
and  all  the  cheap  and  feeble  excitements  of  the 
city  streets  ?  The  groping  and  desiring  spirit  )^ 
of  youth  is  going  indomitably  to  resist  your 
most  thoughtful  schemes  until  you  have  a  school 


214         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

which  from  the  earliest  years,  by  its  freedom, 
its  expressive  life,  its  broad  communal  and  per- 
sonal excitements,  its  contact  with  real  things, 
provides  a  child-life  which  meets  these  inner 
needs.  Our  best  American  public  schools  al- 
ready begin  to  show  that  such  a  child-commu- 
nity life  is  not  at  all  impossible.  Until  we 
achieve  it  generally,  our  continuation  school 
will  be  one  of  the  stop-gaps,  and  a  lusty  warn- 
ing of  what  we  have  failed  to  achieve. 


XXVI 

WHO   OWNS   THE    UNIVERSITIES 

THE  marked  and  immediate  reaction  of  the 
thinking  public  to  the  Scott  Nearing  case 
shows  a  growing  conviction  that  all  is  not 
well  within  the  conventional  forms  of  university 
control.  It  implies  a  sense  that  universities, 
whether  supported  by  the  state  or  privately, 
are  becoming  too  vitally  institutions  of  public 
service  to  be  much  longer  directed  on  the  plan 
of  a  private  corporation.  University  trustees 
are  generally  men  of  affairs,  and  as  men  of 
affairs  they  naturally  tend  to  hold  the  same 
attitude  towards  the  university  that  they  do  to 
the  other  institutions — ^the  churches  and  rail- 
roads and  corporations — they  may  direct.  The 
university  officers  whom  they  appoint  seem  to 
have  exactly  the  same  duties  of  upholding  the 
credit  of  the  institution,  of  securing  funds  to 
meet  its  pressing  needs,  of  organizing  the  ad- 
ministrative machinery,  which  their  corporation 

officers  would  have.    Professors  are  engaged  by 

215 


216         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

contract  as  any  highly-skilled  superintendent 
would  be  engaged  in  a  factory.  If  a  well-paid 
subordinate  of  a  mining  corporation  could  not 
get  along  with  his  colleagues  and  his  men,  or 
if  he  consorted  with  the  I.  W.  W.  or  made  revo- 
lutionary speeches  in  the  streets,  his  services 
would  be  dispensed  with  as  readily  as  the  Penn- 
sylvania trustees  rid  themselves  of  the  un- 
pleasantness of  Professor  Nearing.  Trustees 
may  respect  a  professor  more  than  they  do  in- 
trinsically a  fourth  vice-president.  They  may 
tend  to  err,  as  Chancellor  Day  has  suggested, 
on  the  side  of  ^^ merciful  consideration.''  But 
they  cannot  see  that  the  amenities  of  the  case 
materially  alter  the  professor's  status. 

This  would  be  the  case  of  university  trustees 
stated  in  its  rawest  terms.  That  they  tend  so 
often  to  act  as  if  they  were  a  mere  board  of 
directors  of  a  private  corporation  gives  rise  to 
endless  suspicion  that  they  consult  their  own 
interests  and  the  interests  of  the  donors  of  the 
vested  wealth  they  represent  as  trustees  of  the 
university,  just  as  they  would  protect,  as  faith- 
ful corporation  directors,  the  interests  of  the 
shareholders  of  the  company.  It  is  just  this 
attitude  which  the  thinking  public  is  no  longer 
inclined  to  tolerate.    We  are  acquiring  a  new 


WHO  OWNS  THE  UNIVEESITIES     217 

view  of  the  place  of  the  university  in  the  com- 
munity. When  the  American  college  was  no 
more  than  an  advanced  boys'  academy,  there 
may  have  been  some  excuse  for  this  form  of 
control  by  self-perpetuating  and  irresponsible 
boards  of  trustees.  But  many  things  have 
changed  since  Harvard  and  Yale,  Princeton, 
Pennsylvania  and  Columbia,  were  founded. 

Now  this  determined  autocracy  may  not  have 
worked  so  badly  when  most  of  the  trustees  and 
practically  all  of  the  instructors  were  ministers 
of  the  Gospel,  although  even  in  those  days 
faculties  sometimes  complained  that  their  care- 
ful plans  were  overridden  by  men  ignorant  of 
collegiate  business  and  little  interested  in  edu- 
cational policy.  The  demand  that  trustees' 
functions  should  be  limited  to  the  management 
of  funds,  leaving  the  faculties  to  regulate  ad- 
ministration and  control  appointments  is  a 
hoary  one.  But  with  the  passing  of  control 
from  the  ghostly  to  the  moneyed  element,  the 
gulf  between  trustee  and  professor  has  become 
extreme.  Professors  have  fallen  into  a  more 
and  more  subordinate  place,  and  the  president, 
who  used  to  be  their  representative,  has  now 
become  almost  entirely  the  executive  agent  of 
the  trustees,  far  removed  in  power  and  purse 


218         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

and  public  distinction  from  the  professor.     The 
university  president  in  this  country  has  become 
a  convenient  symbol  for  autocratic  power,  but 
even  when  he  has  become  a  ^^  mayor  of  the 
palace"  and  professors  may  not  approach  their 
governors  except  through  him,  the  real  auto- 
cracy still  lies  in  the  external  board  behind  him. 
This  absentee  and  amateur  form  of  university 
control  is  being  constantly  ratified  by  our  Amer- 
ican notions  of  democracy,  and  that  folkway, 
which  runs  so  omnipresently  through  our  insti- 
tutional life,  of  giving  the  plain  ultimate  citi- 
zen control,  in  order  that  we  may  be  protected 
from    the    tyranny    of    the    bureaucrat.     The 
newer    state    universities    are    controlled    in 
exactly  the  same  spirit.     Eegents,  elected  by 
legislatures,  have  shown  themselves  quite  as 
capable  as  the  most  private  trustees  of  repre- 
senting   vested    political    interests.    Nor    has 
democracy  been  achieved  by  the  cautious  admis- 
sion, in  recent  years,  of  alumni  trustees,  as  in 
the  case  of  Columbia,  or,  as  in  the  case  of  Har- 
vard and  Yale,  by  the  substitution  of  alumni 
for    the    former    state    officials.     Self-perpetu- 
ating boards  will  always  propagate  their  own 
kind,  and  even  if  alumni  trustees  were  ever  in- 
clined to  be  anything  but  docile,  their  minority 


I 


WHO  OWNS  THE  UNIVERSITIES     219 

representation  would  always  be  ineffective  for 
democracy. 

The  issues  of  the  modern  university  are  not 
those  of  private  property  but  of  public  welfare. 
Irresponsible  control  by  a  board  of  amateur 
notables  is  no  longer  adequate  for  the  effective 
scientific  and  sociological  laboratories  for  the 
community  that  the  universities  are  becoming. 
The  protests  in  the  most  recent  case  imply  a 
growing  realization  that  a  professor  who  has 
a  dynamic  and  not  a  purely  academic  interest 
in  social  movements  is  an  asset  for  the  whole 
community.  The  latest  controversy  between 
trustee  and  professors  seems  to  have  been  very 
definitely  an  issue  between  interested  policy  and 
accurate,  technical  fact.  It  seems  to  have  been 
clearly  a  case  of  old  tradition  against  new 
science,  the  prejudiced  guesses  of  corporation 
oflScials  against  the  data  of  a  scientific  student 
of  economics.  Any  form  of  university  control 
which  gives  the  prejudiced  guess  the  power  over 
the  scientific  research  is  thus  a  direct  blow  at 
our  own  social  knowledge  and  effectiveness. 
The  public  simply  cannot  afford  to  run  this  risk 
of  having  the  steady  forging  ahead  of  social 
and  economic  research  curtailed  and  hampered. 
We  cannot  afford  to  depend  wholly  on  the  tern- 


220         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

pering  of  trustees  by  the  fear  of  the  clamor  of 
public  opinion.  It  is  wholly  undesirable  that 
trustees  should  be  detained  only  by  *^  merciful 
consideration '*  from  discharging  professors 
whom  they  find  uncongenial  or  who  they  feel  are 
spreading  unsound  doctrine.  Make  university 
trustees  directors  of  a  private  corporation  and 
you  give  them  the  traditional  right  of  termi- 
nating contracts  with  their  employees  without 
giving  reasons  or  any  form  of  trial.  But  if  the 
university  is  not  to  be  a  mere  degree-manufac- 
tory, or  a  pre-vocational  school  representing 
the  narrow  interests  of  a  specialized  economic 
class,  but  is  to  be  that  public  intellectual  and 
scientific  service  that  we  all  want  it  to  be,  the 
governance  must  be  different  from  that  of  a 
mining  company,  and  the  status  of  the  professor 
different  from  that  of  a  railroad  employee. 
Professors  should  have  some  security  of  office. 
An  interested  public  which  feels  this  way 
will  demand  that  the  faculties  be  represented 
strongly  in  the  determination  of  all  university 
policy  and  in  the  selection  and  dismissal  of  the 
instructors.  It  may  even  demand  that  the  com- 
munity itself  be  represented.  Trustees  who 
really  envisage  the  modern  university  as  a  pub- 
lic service,  as  a  body  of  scientific  and  sociologi- 


WHO  OWNS  THE  UNIVERSITIES     221 

cal  experts,  will  gladly  share  their  power.  If 
they  do  not,  they  will  demonstrate  how  radi- 
cally their  own  conception  of  a  university 
differs  from  the  general  one,  and  it  will  be  the 
duty  of  professors  to  assert  their  rights  by  all 
those  forms  of  collective  organization  whereby 
controlled  classes  from  the  beginning  of  time 
have  made  their  desires  effective. 


XXVII 

THE    UNDEKGRADUATE 

IN  these  days  of  academic  self-analysis,  the 
intellectual  caliber  of  the  American  under- 
graduate finds  few  admirers  or  defenders.  Pro- 
fessors speak  resignedly  of  the  poverty  of  his 
background  and  imagination.  Even  the  under- 
graduate himself  in  college  editorials  confesses 
that  the  student  soul  vibrates  reluctantly  to  the 
larger  intellectual  and  social  issues  of  the  day. 
The  absorption  in  petty  gossip,  sports,  class 
politics,  fraternity  life,  suggests  that  too  many 
undergraduates  regard  their  college  in  the  light 
of  a  glorified  preparatory  school  where  the  ac- 
tivities of  their  boyhood  may  be  worked  out  on 
a  grandiose  scale.  They  do  not  act  as  if  they 
thought  of  the  college  as  a  new  intellectual  so- 
ciety in  which  one  acquired  certain  rather  defi- 
nite scientific  and  professional  attitudes,  and 
learned  new  interpretations  which  threw  experi- 
ence and  information  into  new  terms  and  new 

222 


THE  UNDERGRADUATE  223 

lights.  The  average  undergraduate  tends  to 
meet  studies  like  philosophy,  psychology,  eco- 
nomics, general  history,  with  a  frankly  puzzled 
wonder.  A  whole  new  world  seems  to  dawn 
upon  him,  in  its  setting  and  vocabulary  alien  to 
anything  in  his  previous  life.  Every  teacher 
knows  this  baffling  resistance  of  the  under- 
graduate mind. 

It  is  not  so  much  that  the  student  resists 
facts  and  details.  He  will  absorb  trusts  and 
labor  unions,  municipal  government  and  direct 
primaries,  the  poems  of  Matthew  Arnold,  and 
James's  theory  of  the  emotions.  There  is  no 
unkindliness  of  his  mind  towards  fairly  concrete 
material.  What  he  is  more  or  less  impervious 
to  is  points-of-view,  interpretations.  He  seems 
to  lack  philosophy.  The  college  has  to  let  too 
many  undergraduates  pass  out  into  professional 
and  business  life,  not  only  without  the  germ  of 
a  philosophy,  but  without  any  desire  for  an 
interpretative  clue  through  the  maze.  In  this 
respect  the  American  undergraduate  presents 
a  distinct  contrast  to  the  European.  For  the 
latter  does  seem  to  get  a  certain  intellectual 
setting  for  his  ideas  which  makes  him  intel- 
ligible, and  gives  journalism  and  the  ordinary 
expression  of  life  a  certain  tang  which  we  lack 


224         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

here.  Few  of  our  undergraduates  get  from  the 
college  any  such  intellectual  impress. 

The  explanation  is  probably  not  that  the  stu- 
dent has  no  philosophy,  but  that  he  comes  to 
college  with  an  unconscious  philosophy  so  tena- 
cious that  the  four  years  of  the  college  in  its 
present  technique  can  do  little  to  disintegrate 
it.  The  cultural  background  of  the  well-to-do 
American  home  with  its  ^'nice'^  people,  its 
sentimental  fiction  and  popular  music,  its 
amiable  religiosity  and  vague  moral  optimism, 
is  far  more  alien  to  the  stern  secular  realism  of 
modern  university  teaching  than  most  people 
are  willing  to  admit.  The  college  world  would 
find  itself  less  frustrated  by  the  undergradu- 
ate's secret  hostility  if  it  would  more  frankly 
recognize  what  a  challenge  its  own  attitudes 
are  to  our  homely  American  ways  of  thinking 
and  feeling.  Since  the  college  has  not  felt  this 
dramatic  contrast,  or  at  least  has  not  felt  a 
holy  mission  to  assail  our  American  mushiness 
of  thought  through  the  undergraduate,  it  has 
rather  let  the  latter  run  away  with  the  college. 

It  is  a  trite  complaint  that  the  undergradu- 
ate takes  his  extra-curricular  activities  more 
seriously  than  his  studies.  But  he  does  this 
because  his  homely  latent  philosophy  is  essen- 


THE  UNDEEGEADUATE  225 

tially  a  sporting  philosophy,  the  good  old  Anglo- 
Saxon  conviction  that  life  is  essentially  a  game 
whose  significance  lies  in  terms  of  winning  or 
losing.  The  passion  of  the  American  niider- 
graduate  for  intercollegiate  athletics  is  merely 
a  symbol  of  a  general  interpretation  for  all  the 
activities  that  come  to  his  attention.  If  he  is  in- 
terested in  politics,  it  is  in  election  campaigns, 
in  the  contests  of  parties  and  personalities.  His 
parades  and  cheerings  are  the  encouragement 
of  a  racer  for  the  goal.  After  election,  his  en- 
thusiasm collapses.  His  spiritual  energy  goes 
into  class  politics,  fraternity  and  club  emula- 
tion, athletics,  every  activity  which  is  translata- 
ble into  terms  of  winning  and  losing.  In  Conti- 
nental universities  this  energy  would  go  rather 
into  a  turbulence  for  causes  and  ideas,  a  mili- 
tant radicalism  or  even  a  more  militant  conserv- 
atism that  would  send  Paris  students  out  into 
the  streets  with  a  ^*Cail-laux  as-sas-sin!"  or 
tie  up  an  Italian  town  for  the  sake  of  Italia  Ir- 
redenta. Even  the  war,  though  it  has  called  out\ 
a  fund  of  anti-militarist  sentiment  in  the  Ameri- 
can colleges,  still  tends  to  be  spoken  of  in  terms  ; 
of  an  international  sporting  event.  **Who  will 
win?''  is  the  question  here. 
Now  this  sporting  philosophy  by  which  the 


226         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

American  undergraduate  lives,  and  which  he 
seems  to  bring  with  him  from  his  home,  may 
be  a  very  good  philosophy  for  an  American.  It 
is  of  the  same  stuff  with  our  good-humored 
contempt  for  introspection,  our  dread  of  the 
*^ morbid,"  our  dislike  of  conflicting  issues  and 
insoluble  problems.  The  sporting  attitude  is 
a  grateful  and  easy  one.  Issues  are  decided 
cleanly.  No  irritating  fringes  are  left  over. 
\^  The  game  is  won  or  lost.  Analysis  and  specu- 
lation seem  superfluous.  The  point  is  that  such 
a  philosophy  is  as  different  as  possible  from 
that  which  motivates  the  intellectual  world  of 
the  modern  college,  with  its  searchings,  its  hy- 
potheses and  interpretations  and  revisions,  its 
flexibility  and  openness  of  mind.  In  the  scien- 
tific world  of  the  instructor,  things  are  not  won 
or  lost.    His  attitude  is  not  a  sporting  one. 

Yet  the  college  has  allowed  some  of  these 
sporting  attitudes  to  be  imposed  upon  it.  The 
undergraduates'  gladiatorial  contests  proceed 
under  faculty  supervision  and  patronage. 
Alumni  contribute  their  support  to  screwing  up 
athletic  competition  to  the  highest  semi-profes- 
sional pitch.  They  lend  their  hallowing  pa- 
tronage to  fraternity  life  and  other  college  in- 
stitutions   which    tend    to    emphasize    social 


THE  UNDERGEADUATE  227 

distinction.  And  the  college  administration,  in 
contrast  to  the  European  scheme,  has  turned 
the  college  course  into  a  sort  of  race  with  a 
prize  at  the  goal.  The  degree  has  become  a 
sort  of  honorific  badge  for  all  classes  of  society, 
and  the  colleges  have  been  forced  to  give  it  this 
quasi-athletic  setting  and  fix  the  elaborate  rules 
of  the  game  by  which  it  may  be  won — rules 
which  shall  be  easy  enough  to  get  all  classes 
competing  for  it,  and  hard  enough  to  make  it  a 
sufficient  prize  to  keep  them  all  in  the  race.  An 
intricate  system  of  points  and  courses  and  ex- 
aminations sets  the  student  working  for  marks 
and  the  completion  of  schedules  rather  than  for 
a  new  orientation  in  important  fields  of  human 
interest. 

The  undergraduate  can  scarcely  be  blamed 
for  responding  to  a  system  which  so  strongly 
resembles  his  sports,  or  for  bending  his  energies 
to  playing  the  game  right,  rather  than  assim- 
ilating the  intellectual  background  of  his  teach- 
ers. So  strongly  has  this  sporting  technique 
been  acquired  by  the  college  that  even  when 
the  undergraduate  lacks  the  sporting  instinct 
and  does  become  interested  in  ideas,  he  is  apt  to 
find  that  he  has  only  drawn  attention  to  his  own 
precocity  and  won  amused  notice  rather  than 


228         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

respect.  In  spite  of  the  desire  of  instructors 
to  get  themselves  over  to  their  students,  in  spite 
of  a  real  effort  to  break  down  the  ^^class-con- 
sciousness" of  teacher  and  student,  the  gulf 
between  their  attitudes  is  too  fundamental  to 
be  easily  bridged.  Unless  it  is  bridged,  how- 
ever, the  undergraduate  is  left  in  a  sort  of 
Peter  Pan  condition,  looking  back  to  his  school- 
boy life  and  carrying  along  his  schoolboy  in- 
terests with  him,  instead  of  anticipating  his 
graduate  or  professional  study  or  his  active 
life.    What  should  be  an  introduction  to  pro- 

/  fessional  or  business  life  in  a  world  of  urgent 
political  and  social  issues,  and  the  acquiring  of 
intellectual  tools  with  which  to  meet  their  de- 
mands, becomes  a  sort  of  sequestered  retreat 
out  of  which  to  jump  from  boyhood  into  a  badly- 
prepared  middle  age. 

[^/  The  college  will  not  really  get  the  under- 
graduate until  it  becomes  more  conscious  of  the 
contrast  of  its  own  philosophy  with  his  sport- 
ing philosophy,  and  tackles  his  boyish  Ameri- 
canisms less  mercifully,  or  until  it  makes  col- 
lege life  less  like  that  of  an  undergraduate 
country  club,  and  more  of  an  intellectual  work- 
shop where  men  and  women  in  the  fire  of  their 


THE  UNDEEGEADUATE  229 

youth,  with  conflicts  and  idealisms,  questions 
and  ambitions  and  desire  for  expression,  come 
to  serve  an  apprenticeship  under  the  masters  of 
the  time. 


r 


XXVIII 

MEDIEVALISM   IN    THE   COLLEGES 

'F  the  American  college  is  to  have  a  part  in 
that  new  educational  movement  which  is 
beginning  to  make  the  school  not  merely  a 
preparation  for  life  but  life  itself,  interested  in 
what  has  meaning  to  the  student  at  his  parti- 
cular age  and  situation,  it  will  have  to  recast 
some  of  its  most  cherished  practices  and  ideals. 
The  large  university  to-day  represent  all  stages 
in  the  adjustment  of  intellectual  activity  to 
social  demands,  from  the  intensely  practical - 
schools  of  engineering,  correlating  with  the 
technical  progress  of  industry,  back  to  the  de- 
partments of  literary  scholarship — perhaps  as 
pure  an  anachronism  as  we  have  in  the  intel- 
w  lectual  world  to-day.  The  demands  for  techni- 
cal knowledge  have  pulled  the  university  along, 
as  it  were,  by  the  nose,  and  strung  it  through 
the  ages,  so  that  a  ^^ professor"  to-day  may  be 
an  electrical  expert  fresh  from  Westinghouse, 
or  an  archaic  delver  into  forgotten  poetry. 

The  technical  departments  of  the  universi- 

230 


MEDIEVALISM  IN  COLLEGES     231 

ties  have  kept  bravely  up  with  the  work  of 
^^ learning  by  doing."  Laboratory  and  shop- 
work,  practical  cooperation  with  industry,  con- 
tact with  technical  experts,  have  made  the  newer 
departments  what  they  should  be — energetic 
workshops  where  theory  and  practice  constantly 
fertilize  each  other,  and  where  the  student 
comes  out  a  competent  technician  in  his  craft. 
But  the  place  of  the  college  in  this  scheme  be- 
comes more  and  more  anomalous.  Devoted  to 
the  traditional  studies — the  literatures,  mathe- 
matics, philosophy,  history — it  is  still  strangely 
reminiscent  of  old  musty  folkways  of  the  school- 
man and  theologian.  Every  professor  knows 
the  desire  of  the  average  student  to  finish  his 
college  course  and  grapple  with  his  professional 
studies.  Every  professor  is  aware  of  the  sharp 
quickening  of  interest  which  comes  on  entrance 
to  the  professional  schools.  Though  part  of 
this  feeling  may  be  due  to  impatience  to  get  out 
into  the  world,  much  of  it  certainly  arises  from 
a  realization  that  at  last  one  has  come  into  a 
sphere  where  thinking  means  action.  The  col- 
lege, with  its  light  and  unexacting  labor,  is 
cheerfully  exchanged  for  the  grind  of  the  pro- 
fessional school,  because  the  latter  touches  a 
real  world. 


232         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

Whereas  the  higher  schools  give  the  student 
active  work  to  do,  almost  all  the  methods  of  the 
college  teaching  conspire  to  force  him  into  an 
attitude  of  passivity.     The  lecture  system  is  the 
most  impressive  example  of  this  attitude,  and 
the   lecture   system   seems   actually  to   get   a 
tightening  grip  upon  the  modern  college.    As 
standard  forms  have  become  worked  out,  it  is 
customary  now  actually  to  measure  the  stu- 
dent's course  by  the  number  of  hours  he  ex- 
poses   himself    to    lectures.    For   the    college 
course  to  be  organized  on  a  basis  of  lectures 
suggests  that  nothing  has  happened  since  Abe- 
lard  spoke  in  Paris  to  twelfth-century  bookless 
men.    It  is  as  if  the  magic  word  had  still  to 
be  communicated  by  word  of  mouth,  like  the 
poems  of  Homer  of  old.     The  emphasis  is  con- 
tinually upon  the  oral  presentation  of  material 
which  the  professor  has  often  himself  written 
in  a  text-book,  or  which  could  be  conveyed  with 
much  greater  exactness  and  fullness  from  books. 
V/      These  books  the  student  knows  only  as  ^^col- 
lateral reading."    Nothing  is  left  undone  to 
impress  him  with  the  idea  that  the  books  and 
reviews  and  atlases  are  mere  subsidiaries  to 
the  thin  but  precious  trickle  of  the  professor's 
voice. 


MEDIEVALISM  IN  COLLEGES     233 

Now  there  may  be  some  excuse  for  the  lec- 
ture in  a  Continental  university,  where  the 
professor  is  a  personality,  is  not  compelled  to  j 
lecture,  and  may  make  of  his  delivery  a  kind 
of  intellectual  ceremony.  But  American  pro- 
fessors are  not  only  likely  to  be  atrocious 
lecturers,  but  to  hate  such  compulsory  talking 
as  the  sheerest  drudgery.  Too  often  their  own 
palpable  derision  at  the  artificiality  of  it  makes 
the  lecture  an  effective  barrier  between  the 
student's  curiosity  and  its  satisfaction.  This  is 
not  to  deny  that  the  lecture  might  be  made  into 
a  broad  interpretative  survey,  which  would 
give  the  student  the  clues  he  needs  through  the 
maze  of  books.  This  is  exactly  what  the  best 
college  courses  tend  to  become.  But  for  this 
the  college  will  need  interpreters,  and  not  the 
humdrum  recorders  and  collators  that  it  has  a 
weakness  for. 

The  continuance  of  the  lecture  system  is  only 
symptomatic  of  the  refusal  of  the  college  to  see 
clearly  the  changing  ideals  of  scholarship.  If 
the  student  has  to  think  chiefly  about  exposing 
himself  to  the  required  numbers  of  lectures, 
and  then  to  examinations  which  test  his  powers 
of  receptivity,  he  will  be  forced  into  an  atti- 
tude which  we  are  discovering  is  the  worst  pos- 


V 


V. 


234         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

sible  for  any  genuine  learning.  This  passivity 
may  have  been  all  very  well  when  education  was 
looked  upon  as  an  amassing  of  the  ^ '  symbols  of 
learning,"  or  the  acquiring  of  invidious  social 
distinction.  The  old  college  education  was  for 
a  limited  and  homogeneous  class.  It  presup- 
posed social  and  intellectual  backgrounds  which 
the  great  majority  of  college  students  to-day 
do  not  possess.  The  idea  of  studying  things 
^^for  their  own  sake,''  without  utilitarian  bear- 
ings, is  seductive,  but  it  implies  a  society  where 
the  ground  had  been  prepared  in  childhood  and 
youth  through  family  and  environmental  in- 
fluences. When  higher  education  was  confined 
almost  entirely  to  a  professional  intellectual 
class,  the  youth  was  accustomed  to  see  intellect 
in  action  around  him.  He  did  not  come  to  col- 
lege ignorant  even  of  the  very  terms  and  setting 
of  the  philosophy  and  history  and  sociology 
studied  there.  Now,  when  all  classes  come  to 
college,  the  college  must  give  that  active,  posi- 
tive background  which  in  former  generations 
was  prepared  for  it  outside.  It  must  create 
the  intellectual  stomach  as  well  as  present  the 
food. 

We  are  learning  that  this  can  only  be  done 
by  putting  ideas  to  work,  by  treating  the  matter 


MEDIEVALISM  IN  COLLEGES     235 

taught  in  the  college  as  indispensable  for  any 
understanding  or  improvement  of  our  modern 
world.  In  the  technical  schools,  ideas  and  proc- 
esses become  immediately  effective,  but  noth- 
ing in  the  college  is  really  ^^used";  ideas  are 
not  put  to  work.  Professors  anxiously  desire 
to  ^Heach  students  to  think, '^  but  they  do  not 
give  them  opportunities  for  that  hard  exercise 
which  alone  can  produce  trained  thought.  The 
college  organs  of  expression,  the  debating  clubs, 
literary  magazines,  newspapers,  speaking  con- 
tests, dramatic  societies,  etc.,  are  usually  ama- 
teurish, spasmodic,  unreal.  The  flimsy  back- 
ground of  the  undergraduate  is  not  to  be  won- 
dered at  where  undergraduate  expression  in 
any  channel  is  left  by  the  college  authorities 
unorganized  and  childish.  And  his  low  state 
must  inevitably  continue  until  ideas  are  not 
merely  collected,  with  some  vague  idea  of  gild- 
ing the  interior  of  his  soul,  but  resolutely  put 
to  work.  One  reason  for  the  overmastering 
devotion  to  athletics  in  the  modern  college  is 
exactly  its  activity.  In  that  field  the  student 
can  do  something.  Here,  thank  God,  he  says, 
is  a  place  where  one  can  act ! 

To  make  intellectual  expression  and  not  re- 
ceptivity the  keynote  of  the  college  does  not 


236         EDUCATION  AND  LIVING 

mean  to  turn  it  into  an  intellectual  engineering 
school  or  to  make  it  severely  utilitarian.  It 
should  remain  unspecialized,  the  field  for  work- 
ing out  a  background  for  the  contemporary 
social  world.  The  paradox  is  that  only  by  this 
practical  exercise  can  any  real  cultural  or 
scholarly  power  be  attained.  As  long  as  the 
student  can  speak  of  ^'taking  courses '*  the  re- 
ceptive and  slightly  medicinal  character  of  col- 
lege learning  will  be  emphasized.  Moreover,  as 
the  schools  both  above  and  below  the  college  ad- 
just themselves  to  the  new  conceptions  of  learn- 
ing, the  archaic  forms  of  college  will  cause  it 
to  lag  in  the  race.  The  reason  for  their  per- 
sistence is,  of  course,  that  whereas  the  technical 
demands  of  industry  and  the  keen  emulation  in 
the  professions  have  sharpened  the  higher 
schools  and  forced  a  revision  of  ideals  and 
methods,  the  practical  application  of  the  cul- 
tural studies  of  the  college  has  not  seemed  so 
urgent.  The  turning  of  these  cultural  studies 
into  power  is  to  be  the  exact  measure  of  our 
growing  conviction  that  ideas  and  knowledge 
about  social  relations  and  human  institutions 
are  to  count  as  urgently  in  our  struggle  with 
the  future  as  any  mathematical  or  mechanical 
formulas  did  in  the  development  of  our  present. 


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